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Blog Categories Review Silenced Minstrel - Volume 666 - Reviewed By OccultBlackMetalZine!

Silenced Minstrel - Volume 666 - Reviewed By OccultBlackMetalZine! Sunday September 5 2021, 11:10 AM

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Silenced Minstrel - Volume 666 - Reviewed By OccultBlackMetalZine ! Check it out here at this link: http://occultblackmetalzine.blogspot.com/2021/09/silenced-minstrelvolume-6662021-full.html

Malaysi'a Silenced Minstrel have returned with a new recording which shows the music going for more of an old school mixture of black and death metal and this is a review of his self released 2021 album "Volume 666".

Dark sounding melodies start off the album before going into a very fast and raw musical direction which also uses a great amount of tremolo picking and blast beats. All of t he drum beats are programmed while the vocals are mostly grim black metal s creams that show influences of both the first and second wave era's.

Elements of death metal are also utilized quite a bit throughout the recording while the music is also very heavily rooted in the early 90's. The songs also add in a decent mixture of slow, mid paced and fast parts along with some of the riffing also showing an influence of thrash metal.

A couple of the tracks are also long and epic in length along with a couple of songs also introducing clean playing onto the album as well as the solos and leads also being done in a very melodic yet old school style when they are utilized, spoken word parts and whispers can also be heard on a few tracks and a small amount of keyboards are also added on the closing song. The production sounds very raw and old school while the lyrics cover Occultism, Darkness and Anti Religion themes.

In my opinion this is another great sounding album from Silenced Minstrel and if you are a fan of old school black and death metal, you should check out this recording. RECOMMENDED TRACKS INCLUDE "Unholy Masticating Void" "Lore Of The Red Wind" "Spawn Of The Abyss" and "Of Twilight And Forgotten Ruins". 8 out of 10. - OccultBlackMetalZine

Release Date: August 21, 2021

FFO: Abstracter, Petrification, Noose Rot

Silenced Minstrel (age 44 years, born Saiful Nizam Shukor, 28th March 1976) is a full time singer, songwriter musician from Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. Been playing music since 1991 he co-founded HALUN, a gothic black metal band back in 1996, produced several demos, one EP and one LP before the badly deformed monstrosity was laid to rest in 2015. Writing and producing mostly in his bedroom studio nicknamed “Sky Panacea Enterprise” he spent the entire 2016 gathering writing and recording materials for his debut album “Volume 1” choosing to name it as such as to not make it sounds too rockstar-ish.

The sixth album “Volume 666” is an album that came out in August 2021 and is a continuation of the artist’s previous musical inclination, direction and concept but with an addition of a new band logo and a slightly different album cover art.

<a href="https://silencedminstrel.bandcamp.com/album/volume-666"> Volume 666 by Silenced Minstrel</a>

In 2020 he decided to release a compilation album from the first 3 albums entitled “An Ode To A Sickening Year”, containing nine remixed and partially re-recorded tracks plus a tenth bonus-track at the end of it. It was intended as an allusion to the volatile evolution of the band’s sound during the past five years and, granted, the artist may or may not reuse these musical elements again in the band’s future releases.
The fifth album “Volume 5” saw the further development of sound and direction from the previous album, adding also an orchestral style instrumental black metal song as the last track of the album, a song that hearkens back to his old days in HALUN.

The fourth album “Volume 4” saw him disposing of all the gothic melodic stuff and straight into just vocals guitars bass and drums, trying to go as dry and as harsh as he can, tackling on darker themes like deviant spirituality, Satanism, atheism, philosophy and dark fantasy. Fast tempo is the name of the game; the drums gained more prominence and absolutely no melodic stuff present on this album.

The third album “Volume 3” saw him moving ever closer towards a more melodic black metal sound than the old one, this time the long ditched MIDI orchestra element restored along with some double-layered bass guitar tracks and even gloomier atmosphere than before, reflecting the state of his mind, body, spirit and environment that he’s at during that period of time; with traces of anger, hatred, betrayal and vengeance gracing every song in the album (he fully recovered from his decade long clinical depression that same year).

The second album “Volume 2” saw some maturity in his songwriting, the MIDI orchestra part ditched altogether and it also saw a fair amount of rough edges deliberately highlighted in the mix, and a lot more gothic atmosphere throughout than before especially in the lyrics department, where he wrote songs about the occult, immortality, vampirism and forbidden love between the mortal and the damned, also some cryptic poetic inclinations thrown to the mix just for the heck of it.

“Volume 1” is a combination of melodic gothic stuff mixed with thrash, death and doom metal riffs and black metal atmosphere, utilizing the most basic of guitar effects, cheap keyboards/ synthesizers and MIDI orchestra throughout the entire album to produce something that he’d always wanted to do: anything that didn’t sound like his former band! The album is completed in September but it be long after the production of the second album was underway when that album graced the scene...

The artist is currently occupied promoting his new album, gathering materials for future albums and also working on his other band “Shadowed Grace” playing New Age Scifi Fantasy Instrumental Synthesizer music. Silenced Minstrel is unsigned and is looking for exposure, a recording contract and developing fanbases all across the globe.

Album Cover Art Front.jpg