First of all, I’d like to give my deepest apologies to everyone who’s involved in Dissimulation for putting this review online so late. Due to my RSI problems I was forced to postpone this one. My excuses.

Dissimulation is a band from Lithuania. Lithuania you say? Isn’t that one of the Baltic states? Indeed, but do you know anything about this country except the name of the capital? Well, not me, that’s for sure. The band started in 1993 already, combining trash, heavy and black metal into one dark era of making music. And after the debut album ‘Maras’ the second one called’ Prakeikimas has now been released.

The disk ‘only’ contains six songs but has a playtime of 41 minutes. With this, I think any metalfan can have some ideas on what to expect from Dissimulation. All songs are produced very well and contain a lot of variation which is a a very positive thing, espacially for myself. Because of the fact that the instruments are very clear to hear and the sound is ‘full’, the vocals, typical black metal that I describe as annoying most of the time and the long structures of the songs that could lead into boring repetative structures, the disk remains interesting all the time with a lot of aspects to explore for. 

The songs could all be described in the same way, although I wouldn’t qualify them as equal to eac other. The biggest influence is trash metal, with a lot of hammering on the lowest guitar strings and an immaginary head banging band. But besides this, I reckon black metal (due to the vocals as previously mentioned) heavy metal, parts of power metal and even punk. Characteristic parts are the parts at the end of the songs, or sometimes placed in the middle, that I would call ‘doom’ parts. At first, you think you don’t hear a single thing, which lasts for that long, that I for myself started to wonder whether something happened to my cd-player. But when listening close, a creepy silence is noticeable, the ones you’d probably recognize from computer games like ‘Doom’ or ‘Resident Evil’.

A negative point of this disk is the fact that the guitar riffs are a little bit too easy. Riffs that go upwards and downwards are followed predictably after each other, combined with the usual ‘as-fast-as-you-can-varied-by-some-high-notes-‘ riffs. This makes the cd not that interesting as it could be, technically speaking. The fact that during the (very long) songs, all these riffs are varied pretty well, the disk doesn’t become boring.

Dissimulation sure did a good job, regarding to the fact that it is easy to listen to, despite all the different influences. Yet, the concept that this band has chosen for is a little bit weird and not that convincing as it could be, but a fine exploration for anyone who is seriously interested in something new that is actually produced and finished well.