July 2019 - Metal Mix Tape

This album by Sercati, hailing from Belgium, is going to be a hard one to review for me as this concept stretches across this album, another band "The Nightsalker", a movie to be released sometime soon and a book. Anyway for the purposes of this review we'll stick with the album at hand, and I have to say its a great listen. Sercati play a style of black metal mixed in with some folkier and celtic influences. The instrumental work is really quite sublime in parts. These guys obviously have been playing around for a while (their bio says the band formed in 2009) and the songs have lots of great changes and some infectious melodies. There's some of the usual black metal (modern) style distorted guitars, and also acoustic guitars / keys / flutes and other stuff interspersed within the songs to keep them varied. As far as black metal goes this is really not very extreme infact it would be quite accessible to a number of genre fans, drawing from classic metal influences as well as the celtic folkier black metal sounds. This is quite an ambitious project not only is this album a concept but each of the bands releases have chronicled a chapter in the story of "a fallen angel striving to restore balance between good and evil in a world heading for apocalypse." It also stretches across multiple musical projects. Obviously without hearing the other parts of this story, I can certainly say the music on this album has inspired me to look deeper into this story and at some point I will review the other parts (Book, movie etc...) in that regard this has succeded in my eyes! Whether or not you decide to delve deeper into the story created by Sercati is up to you, but this is a great little album on its own and is really does take the listener on voyage. It is well produced and easy to listen to and the musicianship on here is of quite a high level without falling into the shred or technicality traps. Sercati maintain their musicality all the way through! Anyway check out the band on their official website at Sercati.com, the album will be released in a couple of months but in the meantime you can check out the videos and try to explore their concept a little deeper if you can! Be sure to keep checking out Metal Mix Tape regularly for more cool metal related stuff!