Metus - Beauty

(CD 2009, 55:11, LM 47 CD DG)

The tracks:
  1- At The Gates(5:46)
  2- Beauty(5:17)
  3- And Death Will Be No More(3:59)
  4- Cold Oblivion(3:59)
  5- Abyss For Those Who Destroy The Earth(5:05)
  6- Dark Cobalt Sky(4:21)
  7- Blindness(4:15)
  8- The Tree Of Life(4:01)
  9- Into The Wild(5:13)
10- Save The Unknown(13:11)

Metus Website        samples        Lynx Music


Metus is a one-man project from Poland providing us with a very dark kind of music. It’s a search for the hidden light, the inner peace, faith and love versus the deeds of the flesh, development of spirituality and the desire to reach for the unknown. The man who created this material is vocalist and keyboard player Marek Juza. He recorded Beauty with the help of Krysztof Lepiarczyk (keyboards, piano), Marcin Kruczek (guitars), Krysztof Wyrwa (bass guitar), Grzegorz Bauer (drums) and Piotr Bylica (cello).

Like I said, the music is very dark, but on the other hand it sometimes has nice accents like the acoustic guitars in At The Gates or The Tree Of Life, which cause the sun to appear on the horizon. The dark atmosphere of the album can be described best as a mixture of Paradise Lost – during the One Second­-album – Tiamat and Moonspell: gothic and wave with very desperate sounding vocals with an occasional death grunt to complete the picture. Listening to the title track, a soft and moody piano is followed by a cello creating a dark atmosphere, but Juza’s vocals even turn the song into a black atmosphere. The cello, returning in every song, creates a creepy, graveyard sound. It’s like you’re waiting for the dead to rise from the graves. Save The Unknown is a thirteen- minute track which closes the album. On this piece a perfect balance has been found between the heavy guitar sounds, the solemn cello and the lighter acoustic guitar. The returning melody is played on the cello and the mood-changing guitars take the song from the dark to the light and back into darkness again. The most outstanding part of the album is Marek Juza’s voice. He’s capable of combining a death grunt, with a whisper and a sigh with a voice resembling David Bowie. I’m very impressed by the diversity in this man’s voice.

During these wet and darkening October days, Metus’ music fits perfectly in the stormy and rainy weather outside. If you like the aforementioned bands, Beauty could be a great addition to your collection. It certainly can compete with most of the albums of these bands. When you’re a bit depressed, this dark and moody album will not cheer you up, but it’s definitely worth listening to.

***  Pedro Bekkers (edited by Peter Willemsen)

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