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Review: 'Atarka'
'Sleeping Giant'   


-  Genre: 'Heavy Metal' -  Release Date: '27th March 2020'

Our Rating:
This Birmingham-based metal quintet haven’t been around all that long in real terms, cementing their lineup in 2018. The title of their debut album, then, doesn’t really apply to the band themselves, as latent potential certainly isn’t an issue across the 10 full-throttle, all-out metal tracks that comprise ‘Sleeping Giant’.

The album is all the metal, all at once. All the riffs, all the overdrive, all the double-pedal drumming, all the whiplash guitar attack, all the snarling guttural vocals and simply all the fury, and titles like ‘The Bastard’, ‘Miasma’, and ‘The Tempest’ are fair indicators of the band’s subtle style. There are some furious flurries of technical fretwork, but the primary feature is juggernaut force and propulsive power, and it delivers maximum impact.

The discovery of Tollund Man in 1950 was a significant one, and one which has sustained interest in circles beyond archaeology, perhaps on account of combining rare historical detail and human sacrifice. The track bearing the title is appropriately sludgy, boggy, and brutal.

It feels like a weakening when they shift to clean vocals, as on ‘Miasma’ which flips into nu-metal in places, and there’s some melodic guitar solo work that’s more emo, particularly on the proggy-emo-hardcore crossover of ‘Nebula’. But overall, it’s the raging force and relentless that dominates and defines ‘Sleeping Giant’, making for an intense work.

  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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