AVE MARIA – Chapter 1
- Posted on 18-09-2011
With a name like Ave Maria, you could be forgiven for expecting something with strong ritual and religious overtones. What you get instead is an album that owes more to modern post-hardcore than anything else. The end result is an unusual hybrid form of Black Metal that sounds like a mixture between Watain and Isis.
Ave Maria’s strength is that they allow songs to breathe, letting them build momentum well, working from mid-paced chugging spattered with drum fills to a final cathartic release. The songs feel more like a journey than the simple verse-verse-chorus we so often hear, and still retain that ‘jammed in the studio’ freshness and rawness. In fact, listening to Ave Maria one gets the sense that if they were to take this album on the road it would sound even more formidable live.
While there are sections of this album where you wish the songs would grab you more, it is still a strong release and one which shows Ave Maria to be a band with serious cross genre potential.