I am so pleased with the current evolution concerning our beloved site. Is it because I am such an excellent reviewer (probably it is, hehe), but we do really receive so many great material lately (and faeces of a male cow, aka bull shit, as well, unfortunately). So, to keep it short: Russian act Toluca, with Memoria, a forty-minute seven-tracker, stuff I am getting pretty crazy about.
Memoria brings the kind of post-modernistic (Black) Metal that combines a certain Nordic-oriented grimness of Old with a droning touch of experiment, yet without losing itself into infantile exaggeration of fakely-progressed adventures. The stuff comes closely to the current Post-Hardcore scene (certain riffs and, especially, the vocals, remind me to this specific genre), and just like acts as, let’s say, Left To Vanish, Amenra, Tombs or Zatokrev (I do notice these are pretty distinctive acts, but since I am not that much an amateur of this related scene, I just refer to some material that fits, I think, to this description…), this one flirts pretty much with the massive Sludge-scene we can enjoy nowadays. Memoria is not just another Black Metal release, nor is it a post-modern Sludgecore album; it is something in between, needing some time to evolve, yet worth spending some time to. Sometimes it is rather the one aspect that dominates, then again the other, but there surely is a nice balance in between these extremes if one can call this ‘extremes’, of course).
I saw some colleague-reviewers labelling this material as ‘Screamo-Metalcore’, but who am I to agree? …of course I do not. That’s way too easy, and besides it’s quite insulting. Toluca are not to compare with any infantile (American) Pop-Rock-Metal act at all, even though they do need to ‘grow’ (i.e. to explore more related dimensions, or to create deeper atmospheres). But they will succeed, eventually. This album for sure (they had an EP in the past, by the way) is a nice kick-off!