Guitarist Greg Mackintosh will always be associated with Paradise Lost, the band he has been involved with since they came together in March 1988, but he also had a side project called Vallenfyre. This band was originally created as a tribute to his father John, who passed away in 2009, and was a sounding board for Greg’s grief, but he always knew it was going to be fairly short-lived. Just a few days after Vallenfyre played their last live show in September 2018, Mackintosh announced the formation of a brand-new band, Strigoi. Named after the troubled spirits in Romanian mythology who could rise from the grave and assume an entirely different form, Mackintosh provides guitar and vocals and is joined by bassist Chris Casket (Extreme Noise Terror, Vallenfyre), while Waltteri Väyrynen (Paradise Lost) has provided the drums in the studio but will not be part of the band.
Musically the result is a mix of old-school death metal, black metal grindcore and punk for a style of extreme metal which has far more in common with the release of the early 90’s than with the current over-produced and clinical music we get from many. If someone had given me this on cassette tape I would not have been surprised, as it has a lot in common with the tape-trading days of 30 years ago. Although Mackintosh states he has moved away from the crusty sound of Vallenfyre that is still in tere as well, along with some doom elements here and there. It is musically all over the place, switching between slow and quick, doom and death, but always brutally heavy and wlays with a heavy punk and do it yourself ethos. There are times when it feels like Darkthrone and Sabbath are doing unspeakables on a black altar, then others when it is a straightforward attack to the head and crotch.
“With Vallenfyre, we went down this path where it got more and more crusty,” says Mackintosh. “I thought we couldn’t take it any further, so I needed to put in some new elements. With StrigoI, there’s a bit of spookiness, even some subtle elements of industrial and even black metal.” Possibly not so subtle, this feels like a blast from the past, brought up to date and is something which fans of uncompromising metal certainly need to seek out.
Rating: 8/10
Links:
https://www.strigoi.co.uk/
https://www.nuclearblast.de/en/
