Sunday, January 12, 2014

Relicts - "12 on the Richter Scale" [2008]

Artist: Relicts
Title: 12 on the Richter Scale
Genre: Death/Black Metal
Country: Turkmenistan
Year: 2008

Track List:
  1. Vendidad
  2. Anthill
  3. Desert
  4. Haoma
  5. Sacred Fire
  6. Underside of Truth
  7. Stratosphere
  8. Asphyxy
  9. End of Times
  10. 12 on the Richter Scale
One more rarity from the former USSR. Relicts were formed in 1998 in Ashgabat and released one full-length album & a couple of demos so far. Judging from the names, all the musicians of Relicts are Russian, except for the guitarist Serdar Salihov. According to him, the music of Relicts should be labelled as  "Avestian death metal", because some of their songs (Vendidad, for example) are based on Zoroastrian texts (a/k/a Avesta). Personally I don't have much interest in Zoroastrianism, but "12 on the Richter Scale" is an interesting album, despite its reasonably low quality of production. It's old school black/death metal, but it doesn't sound as monotonous as many other early death metal bands.

To my knowledge, there are no metal bands in Turkmenistan except for Relicts and their side project KIM. There was a thrash metal band called Paramedics in the late 90's - early 2000's, but not much is known about them except they've split up after releasing only two demos.

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