Atlas of Metal: Angola

Angola is the first country in the Atlas of Metal from Sub-Saharan Africa. In other words, the very last place in the inhabited world where you expect to find metal. And it is as rare as you might think. Metal Archives lists only two bands from the country. Thankfully, both of them are currently active.

Before Crush is listed as a death metal/deathcore band, but they sound like pretty straight-forward metalcore to me. The Bullet for My Valentine t-shirt doesn't exactly give them a lot of credibility in my eyes--and the water pouring over the dude's head in this video makes it even worse. There's nothing original about it, and the vocals are terrible. Still, they get credit for trying, considering where they're from.



Neblina is listed as a heavy metal band in Metal Archives, and for some reason they have a Wikipedia page which calls them gothic metal. From the one video I'm sure is theirs, the gothic metal tag is appropriate, but there's also a distinct Latin influence (Angola was part of the Portuguese empire). I've found some more videos that may be from the same band, and if it is, then it sounds like they listened to a lot of ska . . . either way, I wouldn't be interested to hear anything else from them.



Outside of the archives, the only other thing I can find is Katingation, a death metal band who feature only a 15 second clip on their MySpace to let the world hear them. And it's not terribly promising, as far as offering anything new, but when it's that short it's hard to say. I would actually see them if they were opening for somebody else, though.

So. Yeah. That's metal in Angola. Not exactly an up-and-coming scene.