Necronomicon: The Return of the Witch (2010) Review

Necronomicon is a Canadian death metal band who've been around since 1991. I picked up their latest, The Return of the Witch.

Their sound seems to be mostly similar to Unleashed, but with influence from Nile and Dimmu Borgir. They sometimes use choirs for emphasis (see the opening track) as well as keyboards. These elements are perhaps best used on "Necropolis", an eerie and forbidding kind of track atypical of death metal. "The Time Is Now" has a clever guitar solo, and they threw in a drum-based interlude ("Lillith") about 3/4 of the way in.

Despite these few innovative moves, this is mostly generic death metal that doesn't really sound like it's from anywhere. At times, they're good enough to make originality unimportant--the title track and closer, for instance--but the rest of the time it's nothing to go out of your way to hear.



The Verdict: This is well-executed, but mostly typical, death metal. Failure to innovate has been a thorn in the side of the genre for some time now, with only a few (e.g. Gojira or Cynic) doing anything to move it forward, but nobody taking any cues from them. You could definitely do a lot worse than this one, so I give it 3 out of 5 stars.