ROOT — Heritage of Satan (review)

ROOT — Heritage of Satan album cover Album · 2011 · Black Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Time Signature
In nomine satanas...

Genre: dark / black metal

Root's music is as strange as their name is. It is not strange in the sense that it is weird or avant-garde or challenging or anything like that. It is strange, because it is unusual compared to most other black metal around these days.

It seems that Root's inspiration goes back beyond the Norwegian-based wave of black metal, the offspring of which dominates most of the modal black metal scene in one way or another, to very early tracks like Venom and Hellhammer. Thus, rather than only blastbeats, harsh vocals and tremolo picking, you can expect more defined riffage, hardcore punk influences, doomy grooves and even hard rock riffage.

Thus, a track like 'In Nomine Satanas' is ladden with doomy riffage, while 'Legacy of the Ancestors' combines thrash metal and hardcore punk and 'Revenge of Hell' is centerd around a groovy sludgy riff. It is only in the fourth track that the black metal stock elements that are tremeolo picking and blastbeating pop up, and, still, they are joined by thrash metal riffage and heavier breakdowns. While black metal elements do pop up now and then throughout the rest of the album (as in 'Son of Satan'), Root draw just as much on other types of heavy metal music, which works extremely well, while doomy and sludgy riffage is not uncommon either (as in 'His Coming').

Production-wise, the album is characterized by the typical cold black metal sound, except the bass is quite dominant, almost having a booming Black Sabbath-quality to it. Also, rather than opting for dirty raw black metal lo-fi production, Root have gone with a, not polished, but still quite well-defined and crisp sounding production.

So, Root's music is really not strange, it is just not one-tracked, and the band is not afraid to reach out beyond black metal, generating a massively appealing and hard rocking species of dark metal which is multifaceted and varied and, most importantly, expressive.
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