Crescent - Carving the Fires of Akhet (2021)^{Release ID: 30158}

I enjoy the sound and melody of Middle Eastern music but when heard in the context of metal it takes on a whole different level of intrigue, sounding darker and more exotic, at least to this jaded westerner's ears anyway. Crescent are an Egyptian band who take the history and folklore of their much historied homeland and present it through a blackened death metal prism. The result is a fairly brutal-sounding assault that still manages to summon up a nice level of melody and, with it's assimilation of elements of egyptian folk music, brings a nice contrast to the more usual and numerous instances of european folk-influenced black metal. Yes, they are kind of treading a similar path to Nile, but are much rawer than the US tech-death merchants and other than thematically they actually have little in common.

Personally I think Crescent deserve a bit more exposure and are certainly no gimmick, their Middle Eastern-flavoured metal is the real deal and anyone looking for a well-written and produced album of blackened death with a different slant should at least give Carving the Fires of Akhet a listen.