The Industrial Twilight: Asparez

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Asparez - "Anathema" [1990]

Artist: Asparez

Title: Anathema

Genre: Heavy/Power Metal

Country: Armenian SSR
Year: 1990

Track List:

Clearing
Fire & Metal
Sorrow
Crazy Age
Tell Me
White As Black
Untruthful Game
Black Garden

Asparez were quite possibly the very first Armenian metal band, formed in 1982 and released their first demo in 1985. The demo, however, is now lost, so this album is their one and only available release. It was recorded around 1988, during the times when an ethnic conflict in Armenia and Azerbaijan was already brewing (the song "Black Garden" is dedicated to these events).

On last.fm, I've seen it tagged as "protoSOAD", but as for me, the only things in common between Asparez and SOAD are their "heavy" sound and ethnic Armenian musicians in their line-up. In fact, Asparez are much more similar to another well-known Soviet Armenian metal band, Ayas. I'd recommend both bands to anyone who's looking for obscure old school metal with lyrics in a weird sounding language:

Download

No comments:

Post a Comment

About this blog

I created this blog mostly because I wanted to practise my English skills, and to showcase the industrial, gothic, punk, metal, neofolk and progressive rock scene of Russia/ex-USSR and Eastern Europe (especially Hungary) in the meanwhile.

As you can see, this blog doesn't take itself seriously enough, but I hope I'm doing good enough with my reviews even if my proficiency in English is limited. Along with the aforementioned stuff from Eastern Europe, I occasionally post some classic and rare albums that aren't to be missed, and generally whatever I want. Other categories of note:

* finno-ugric rarities - various music (including pop) in minor Finno-Ugric languages which I'm interested in because of my heritage. The music from Hungary, Finland and Estonia can be found under the respective categories;

* lo-fi - various poorly recorded demos from before 2000 that are of historical importance. Most of these demos come from the USSR era, so you might want to check out the USSR category as well.

As of now, I try to post only music that has already been made free by the artists themselves, or the rare old releases that are out of print. But if you're an artist and would like me to remove the download links of your work, just contact me using the form below.

Sorry, I don't do reviews by request, I don't have the time. Moreover, I think the bands that feel the need to advertise themselves by sending their demos to as many blogs as possible are usually just plain boring. If you want to contact me for any other reason, use the contact form below.

It should be obvious enough that reviewing anything on here doesn't equals endorsement of artists' personal views. This especially concerns neofolk and martial industrial. It'd be fair enough to say that I have the same approach to the political and religious topics in these genres as Laibach do.

Many of the female musicians featured on my blog are amateur models, and in many cases their modelling work is no less interesting than their music. Right now I'm working on giving it a separate section of the blog (just in case if anyone wants my review to be only about their music and not their looks). The work is in progress, check back later if you're interested.

The title of my blog comes from a song by The Kovenant (album "SETI", 2003).