[Album Review] Keres — Homo Homini Lupus
Liberate the wolf within you
The sophomore record from Italian black metal band Keres, Homo Homini Lupus (Man is Wolf to Man) is equal parts blackened ferocity, and death metal viciousness, but given just enough melodic depth to make this a well-crafted extreme metal record. A great example of a killer album art going a LONG way to pulling you right into the band you may not have found.
Admittedly, this is my first foray into Keres’ catalog, and taking a trip down their bandcamp shows that this is their second record following 2016’s Heresy. The progression in both sonic quality and songwriting prowess is immediately apparent as soon as the opener “Exist for War” kicks in, which is a surprisingly melodic track given the band’s aesthetic.
Make no mistake, there is plenty of black metal to go around for everyone, with tracks like “Immaculate Incarnation of Darkness”, “Eradicate the Infected Seed”, firing on all cylinders with tremolo-picked riffs and blast-beat goodness. Plenty of influences are evident in Keres’ songwriting, with a Dark Funeral-esque arpeggiated intro to “Oblivion” and “Leviathan” giving way to a more Behemoth-ian anthemic chuggy sections.
This is the kind of black metal that I respond the best to, modern production, death metal leanings, melodic inclusions, and vocal deliveries favoring the lower register growls as opposed to the screeched vocals that litter the “trve kvlt” black metal scene. In addition, lengthier musical sections as heard in “Pale Horse of Extinction” and “Until Everything’s Burned” allow much-needed room for the guitars to expand their melodies into requisite levels of grandiosity. The closing track of the record “Void and Silence” also showcases an elegant guitar solo, a songwriting tool oft neglected in many black metal records.
Vocalist Ares shows impressive range and sounds very similar to Nergal (Behemoth) at that band’s blackened death metal heights before they descended into overly theatric mediocrity. Guitarists Astahrot, Notrhakr, and Azrael create a killer sonic tapestry that is both melancholic and menacing. A black metal band with three guitarists is another outlier, Keres continues to break barriers on common genre tropes.
While the production is leaps and bounds superior to the basement/cave sounding lo-fi values that the genre embraces, the dynamics of the mix do sound to be compressed into the low-mid frequency range, taking away from the bass frequencies. Some of the oomph and thump of the bass, guitars, and drums is lost with these creative choices.
Homo Homini Lupus is an underrated gem in a saturated genre, bringing enough outside influences to breathe fresh air into tired tropes, without compromising on sincere intensity, yielding a truly enjoyable blackened death metal record!
