Considered as one of Holland’s "better" metalacts, Callenish Circle just put out their latest record [Pitch.Black.Effects] (PBE for short) and it is the bands 5th full-lenght offering. I’m a pretty big fan of the bands style (which is inspired by the type of melodic deathmetal we know from our northern friends), so I was curious what Callenish’s new album would bring.

Opener "This Day You Regret" starts with some morsecode sounding beeps, but quickly the guitars kick in. With its heavy, syncopated riff definitley made my head go up and down and was instantly a good example of what would follow. Patrick Savelkoul’s uses a familiar type of screaming that will be appreciated by most fans of this kind of metal, altough I personaly prefer a lower sounding voice like in the track "Blind", which definitley makes the sound a bit "meatier". Callenish Circle seem to have matured as a band, which shows in the songwriting. The whole cd sounds balanced with groovier mid-tempo songs mixed with uptempo songs.

The band seems to use electronic effects, but unfortunately those are usually kept for song intros. I would love to hear some more of those during the songs! My favorite track is definitly "Sweet Cyanide" with its phased-intro which morphs into a catchy main riff, and not to forget a good guitarsolo and outro. I smell a succesfull single in this one! The disc closes with the etheral sounding "Pitch Black", a dreamy outro to an otherwise heavy cd. Im curious if the beeping on the end of the track (and the beginning of this cd) is some actual morse code..I'll let some real fan look into that.

Ofcourse, one could put questionmarks regarding the "original sound" of this band, which has been done before by many others. If you are looking for something new and fresh that sounds different than the current crop of Swedish metalbands, you might need to look somewhere else. Fans of the genre can easily check out this cd, because all in all, it is damn good piece of modern melodic death metal!