RAVEN WOODS — Enfeebling the Throne (review)

RAVEN WOODS — Enfeebling the Throne album cover

Album · 2011 · Death Metal

3.5/5 · 2011-03-25
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Enfeebling the Throne is the second full-length album by Turkish death metal band Raven Woods. The band’s sound mixes death metal with some black metal influence to create a blackened death metal record that doesn’t sound too far off from what bands such as Behemoth deliver. The album has a somewhat different line-up to the band’s previous offering, ...and Emotions Are Spilled (released in 2006), with only guitarist Cihan Engin and bassist Ozan Yildirim (who was actually the drummer on the previous album) remaining. Since I am not personally familiar with the band’s previous work I will unfortunately not be unable to say how well Enfeebling the Throne compares to it.

Enfeebling the Throne starts off with an intro track, Zâhir&Bâtin, which unfortunately I feel inclined to discard as one of those intro tracks that feels completely useless within the context of the entire record. It adds nothing to it and impact of the first proper song, which is the title track, would not be affected in any way by the intro’s absence. Fortunately the title track quickly makes me forget the useless intro as it’s a pretty solid track and definitely one of the best on the album. Songs like this one show that Raven Woods are very capable of making blackened death metal with the best of them.

Unfortunately the album as a whole comes across as something of a mixed bad as the next two songs, Breathless Solace and Ecstacy Through Carnage actually pass me by without being able find anything truly noteworthy about them. They’re not bad certainly, but there is nothing here that makes me sit up and pay attention in case I miss anything, because the sound is predictable and formulated.

A surprise then when Torture Palace kicks in a throws a spanner in the works. Here the band introduce much emphasis on instrumental work with some good acoustic work that clearly takes some influence from Turkish folk music (heard even more in the following track, Upheaven-Subterranean) and some backing female vocals in parts of the song, without losing the blackened death metal feel of the previous songs. This, Upheaven-Subterranean and later track The Grey Cold Shade give Raven Woods a bit more uniqueness to their sound and I find myself wishing that they’d incorporate more of the folksy acoustic work into their music. That may be in part to my being very much into folk metal but it’s also in part that the blacked death metal parts of Enfeebling the Throne don’t come across as anything that hasn’t been done before. Again that’s not to say it’s bad, because it’s not, far from it in fact, but as a whole Enfeebling the Throne does seem to lack some sort of spark to get it out of ‘good’ territory into ‘great’ territory. The band is clearly a group of skilled musicians but I can’t help feeling that if they really honed those folk influences and incorporated them into the overall sound a bit better they’d be a much stronger unit because of it.

They still manage to pull a few surprises out of the hat though, such as some clean vocals in the song Stay (Dedicated to Evren'Duskhunter, R.I.P.), which also has guitar parts that sound closer to melodic death metal than blackened death, something heard in several of the later tracks on the album, such as The Fading Trace.

The final track on the album is Azab-I Mukaddes, which is something of an outro piece done entirely in the Turkish folk style that we’ve heard briefly before. It’s a nice ending to the album, but again, I’d definitely have liked to have heard more of the style included throughout the whole package.

Overall Enfeebling the Throne is a quite enjoyable release from Raven Woods and despite the faults I found with it I do recommend this album and the band, because I think they’ve got potential to deliver something truly exceptional in the future. This time they haven’t come together quite as well as I’d have liked, because throughout I found myself really wishing I could like this album more than I do. Nevertheless it’s very far from being a bad album and you could do much worse than to give Raven Woods a listen.