It’s in Russia that Concrete Age begins in 2010.
Through time, Frosty J (guitar/vocals) is accompanied by several musicians, then leaves for England, and it’s with Boris Zahariev (guitar), Erick Red (bass, Slave Steel) and Francesco Giorgianni (drums, ex-Smiling Madman) that the band releases Spirituality, its seventh album.
The band’s style is hard to define. Energic rhythmics picks as much in Death, Thrash and Groove Metal, but the band’s influences can also be find in Tibetan folkloric music as well as into other countries. The band names this very effective style Ethnic Metal, and that’s with Ratel King that we discover it. The sound is heavy, catchy, and full of backing vocals to accompany the vocalist’s howlings. Welcome Back offers the same recipe, with sometimes clean vocals, indian flutes, and above all a huge fix of pure energy. Spirituality melts heady sonorities with catchy and ravaging riffs, while Isis Flower focuses on joyful and dancing tones, which comes to contrast the violence the band spreads since the beginning. Om Namo Shivaaya makes us be part of this hindu meditation, without forgetting to make us bang our head, before including an airy break and a piercing solo. Dogon comes back to a massive song with various influences thanks to this thick rhythmic, then Tomahawk Song comes to crush us after a soft introduction. North Native American influences are more than obvious, but the sound is sharper than an axe, then it’s with Poets of the Northern Mountains that the album ends. A softer song than the others, but which witnesses of this feeling of escape the band offers.
Impossible to label, Concrete Age’s spirit swirls through cultures. Spirituality’s heavy basis is permanently overcomed by ethnical, ambient and seizing sonorities, without leaving violence aside.
90/100
