Traditional Black Metal
Every so often a band emerges out of nowhere, suddenly garnering excellent reviews, heaps of praise and wide-ranging tours. Often these bands are more than worth the praise, often they are not. Unfortunately, Sonic Reign are the latter. It is actually more irritating when a band who are simply neither here nor there are praised, rather than a bad band. With their debut 'Raw Dark Pure' in hand, I decided to listen with an open mind, unfortunately there was little to impress on offer.
To be quite frank, there really isn't that much special about Sonic Reign. I've heard a lot of praise for them in both print and on the internet claiming how they will be a new and great thing for black metal, and whilst they certainly put out a few decent tunes, they're really nothing new. 'Raw Dark Pure' is I suppose exactly that; heavy, traditional black metal, and unless you're a worshipper of Darkthrone and their ilk and all the bands who follow them, this album won't really tempt you.
One thing that is very annoying in the CD is the production of the drums, they are simply brought out to the forefront of the mix far too much and end up almost "getting in the way" of the other instruments. When the drums are both louder and clearer than the guitar work in a genre such as metal, you know something has gone wrong. Again, like with other poorly produced black metal bands the vocals occasionally seem muffled by the rest of the instruments too, which is interesting in small doses, annoying in any more. Quite frankly most of the production shows that they are at least competent at the technical level, but that they infuriatingly chose this rather annoying drum-heavy sound.
Overall then this simply has to fall into the description of "average". It is actually quite distinctly average, I couldn't pick out anything much at all during it which was outstandingly good or outstandingly terrible. Take that as you will. If you haven't got enough black metal weighing down your shelves at this point, then perhaps this release will intrigue you. However, if you're only looking for something new, innovative or simply entertaining then I would perhaps steer clear of this release.