Ignis Spiritus

With members from Urn running this project, it's reasonable to expect blackened thrash, and that's precisely what we get on Flame's Ignis Spiritus EP, a rough but not unlistenable sound. An early-Bathory style with a little Viking-metal bombast thrown in, this album doesn't push boundaries for its genre, but it's competently executed.

The guitars are down in the lower register along with multi-instrumentalist Blackvenom's vocals, a wailing lead guitar providing all the treble notes. Unlike a lot of this genre's examples, the drumming is mixed nicely in, varying from blastbeats to high-speed thrash fills. The chugging rhythms move things along at a quick pace without unduly hurrying the tracks. Usually this works, especially on Force and Fire where the band takes a more leisurely approach to developing the song and leaves off thrashing for a while. Flame's competent and the EP is worth a spin or two, though it's unlikely to blow a listener away unless they're already major fans of the Urn sound.