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Band:Abigail Williams Album:Legend Record Company:Candlelight records Writer: Shut Up And Die Media: Myspace Click Album Cover To Buy Now

DUDE! BLACK METAL FROM ARIZONA!!!! What? Black metal from Arizona! Are you stoned? Nope, apparantly Tempe is grim and necro and troo and whatnot. Abigail Williams is a newer band gracing the extreme metal world with their presence. Playing competent black metal (I've seen these guys listed as death metal, but I can't agree) with a style more akin to melodic bm than the stripped down bm, these 5 metalheads present their debut album "Legend". The lineup is as such: Ken Sorceron (vocals/ guitar/ synths), Brad Riffs (guitar/ leads), Elias (drums), Ellyllon (piano/keyboards), and Bjorn Dannov on guitars. Bjorn is also formerly of the prominent and lethal Arizona death metal band Vehemence, who broke up in late '05 (which really sucks, as they were one of my favs) due to musical differences.

The album itself has very nice guitar work, particularly the rythms, which sound like a cross between Vehemence (shocking) and The Black Dahlia Murder. The vocals are also pretty reminiscent of BDM, and I think they are quite masterful and effective. Higher pitched screams are accented by guttarals in a truly heart pounding, hair raising fashion. The drumming is great, speedy and unrelenting at times, and adrift in the background at others. Bass playing can not be perceived by my radar as much as I would like, but it's not impossible to hear either. The keys and synths, however, are just not to my liking. For some reason I can **almost** tolerate/ignore them on this record though because the rest of the musicianship is that good. For fans of bands like Dimmu Borgir or Emperor: you will enjoy this aspect of the music! On the down side: the music tends to kinda run together and not really stand out (read as: suffer) due to the keyboards, I simply couldn't hold my attention enough to lock into the nicer parts 100%. It may seem like I just contradicted myself, and I did, but the power of Abigail Williams apparantly is evil enough to make one do so. Evil bastards....

5 tracks make up this disc and all suffer from the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde syndrome. I recall Bjorn's prior band Vehemence having the same issue years back (although nowhere near to the extent of these guys)....and produced a much more improved and listenable record once the keys were removed. Perhaps this will be the case with these guys in the future....but that's just me. Nonetheless: this is a solid album with fairly decent songs like "Like Carrion Birds" and "Procession Of The Aeons". "Procession..." has a massive blast beat in the beginning and is just explosive! The rest of the disc is basically all the same. Again, definitely an album for fans of more melodic black metal who can appreciate the racket of "melody" via the usage of keyboards.

Band:Abigail Williams Album:Legend Record Company:Candlelight records Writer: Shut Up And Die Media: Myspace Click Album Cover To Buy Now

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