KARRAS
KARRAS "We Poison Their Young"
By Dr. Abner Mality
In more than 25 years of reviewing music, I have never seen a band that has been more grossly mislabelled than this French outfit. Their press sheet calls them "extreme power metal" and says they should appeal to fans of "BLIND GUARDIAN, NIGHTWISH, SABATON" and similar bands. Anybody who picks this up and expects to hear even one single note resembling those bands will be shocked out of their wits. There is absolutely ZERO resemblance to any form of power metal from KARRAS...the idea that this can be compared to evening gown metal like NIGHTWISH is absurd beyond reason. It's more like DEFLESHED meeting CONVERGE.
Instead, what we have here is a brief excursion into harsh and violent grindcore with touches of thrash and hardcore punk. No keys or shredding guitar solos or melody to be found PERIOD! Once you accept that this is really what KARRAS sounds like, you might just find your ass getting kicked with a vengeance by the grinding violence they purvey. Instead of Tarja Turunen or Hansi Kursch handling the vocals, we get a guy yelling his head off in pissed off anger. It's not death growls, but just very raw hardcore shouting. Songs are short and mostly blazingly fast, with virtually no guitar solos. The epic "Demons Got Rhythm" lasts all of nine seconds and final track "Negative Life" grinds and lumbers along for just over three minutes....a virtual magnum opus for these dudes. The whole album clocks in at well under a half hour.
It's a potent dose of anger but does get a little monotonous, especially the vocals which never vary in tone. It's just mind-boggling how this bunch get labelled "power metal". Incidentally, the band are named for the unfortunate priest from "The Exorcist", not the American football player turned sitcom actor.