Album Review: White Stones - Kuarahy
Reviewed by Neil Bolton
Opeth’s bass player Martin Mendez has created a new death metal project named White Stones. Although it would be pure conjecture to conclude Martin longs for the more extreme side of Opeth, similar to many of their fans, he obviously has an urge to write and perform this style of music once again. In saying that, Martin wishes to assure Opeth fans in he is 100% comfortable with what he is doing with Opeth, and this is a return to his death metal roots. This band is also a return to his personal roots as the album is named after his birth place Uruguay. He goes on the explain:
"I feel strongly connected to Uruguay still, I wanted to write music related to that — the sun on the Uruguayan flag I transformed into the White Stones logo; there are a lot of small things that connect the record to that place. 'Kuarahy' is the native Uruguayan people’s word for ‘Sun.’"
On this ten track recording he is joined by vocalist Eloi Boucherie, Jordi Farre on drums and fellow band mate Frederik Akesson plays lead guitar on every song apart from the fifth track on here called the 'The One'. This song has a solo from Per Eriksson.
The album begins with an opening instrumental title track 'Kuarahy' a one minute twenty four second introduction that will most likely be skipped over once the listener has heard it once. We then get into the main meat of this recording, excellent death metal growling vocals lay on top of a kind of groovy death metal sound. Martin’s bass is prominent in the mix and is all the better for this. You can recognise his style from his day job along with the guitar sound. A good vocalist is very important with this type of music, possibly more so than any other genre. A weak vocal growl can ruin a well constructed song. Happily this is not the case with Eloi, he has a perfect vocal style for this music adding a glorious menace to the album.
This stands way above a lot of other music in this field, it feels professional and heartfelt. No song is over long with five minutes fifty nine being the longest, but with the amount of songs on here, all of the same hight standard you are getting good value. It would be unjust to call this old school death metal as the groove adds something slightly different in style, but be assured, it does add and not detract from the sound. Martin Mendez along with White Stones have produced an awesome death metal album. I hope he is rightly proud of this work. I also hope this is the first of many.
White Stones release 'Kuarahy' via Nuclear Blast on March 13th
