Label: earMUSIC
Date: March 8th, 2024
As we know very well, bands playing metal don’t come only from huge cities. This is the same in the case of Tunisia as well and the best evidence is created 2001 under the name Xtasy ensemble you’ll keep an eye on for next few minutes of reading (writing will take me “a little” more time, I guess). The fact is Ezzahra is located quite near Tunis, but at the same time it’s still a separate town, with something like six thousand inhabitants. Some of them are active on the field we’re interested in here. Myrath still plays only two of four original members, I mean those who played in Xtasy before. By the way, guys work hard from the very beginning and “Karma” is their sixth, or seventh if we count the live album “Live in Carthage”, full-length.
It contains eleven songs with a total time of forty seven minutes and thirty seven seconds. I found somewhere, actually on some portal I use quite often to reach new bands, description of their music like Middle Eastern folk/progressive metal. And well, I tell you directly I can’t agree with that at all. I even don’t mean the word “prohressive” isn’t what I like when it takes music, because it describes anything in my opinion. I also somehow can’t recognize any signs of Middle Eastern folk here. Of course I’m not any expert when we talk about this kind of music (for obvious reasons, I know Polish folk best), but I still don’t give up with what I said before. I hear a lot of keyboards instead and I don’t think this is a typical instrument for Middle Eastern, or any other, folk – even if I’m any expert here. Actually, I was never too huge a fan of so called, in my world, folk metal. Besides, this is definitely metal who dominates here! So, if I’d need to use some term to let you know what you should expect from “Karma”, and that’s what the most of you wanna, I’d say that’s just power metal with some another influences, maybe even folk ones as well, but it’s not as clear as a day and even more so huge. And after reading two last phrases you already know the most important and leading instrument is of course guitar. As I wrote before keyboards participate to a large extent here, but that’s still an ancillary instrument. It just follows the guitar line and makes music even more easy going. But this is done in a subtle way and sometimes that’s not too easy to recognize them. I mean, that’s hidden in the background and doesn’t “disturb” the common character of the creativity. That’s both the guitar and vocalist who are responsible here for making it very melodic. And to be honest, it’s a little bit monumental one quite often.
I have some associations with more well-known bands of the genre, but as you know very well after lecture of my reviews you’ll be, maybe even deeply, disappointed if you expect some names here. I can only tell you I’m talking about some German bands and also the Swedish one at the moment, and this is also somehow about the cover-art. Anyways, you’ll find here a lot of guitar or bass tricks, some interesting passages and so on. But don’t be afraid, that aren’t some displays for displays! Guys know very well what kind of music they wanna play and just do it. Of course one or another orthodox fan of death or black metal could say I’m totally crazy about things saying stuff like that, but honestly I don’t give a shit. “Karma” is a good album and I’ll surely return to it. Probably it’ll not happen weekly or something, because I listen to such music mostly only when I wanna calm down and slow down, have the right mood to it, what happens not too often to be honest. However, that’s as easy as pie to do it since full-length music is available since International Women’s Day by earMUSIC on several platforms dedicated to spreading music and videos as well. So don’t wait any moment more and just check it out right now! I’m sure most of you who like such creativity become immediately band’s fans and will also be hungry to listen to all of their earlier releases.
