MYSTIC STORM - Из хаоса древних времен / From The Ancient Chaos LP (Black Vinyl)
Mystic Storm

MYSTIC STORM - Из хаоса древних времен / From The Ancient Chaos LP (Black Vinyl)

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Limited to 400 copies. Comes with inlay and poster.

I feel like there's this golden little spot in the venn diagram between thrash metal and oldschool heavy stuff with very few bands in it. Voyager era Manilla Road, a bunch of tunes off Ride the Lightning, the new Eternal Champion, likely a few others that I just straight out don't know about. Mystic Storm's full length is something I can add to that vanishingly small but really really really good list.

There's that bay area muscularity, with plenty of that double time snare abuse that makes the genre so fun; it's very muscular and there's heaps of down picking yada yada yada. It's just infused- and well, I would add- with a sense of epic melody more often than not, that Voyager-esque Manilla Road (really, that album is by a distance the best comparison) kinda stuff, throughout there's a definite sense that atmosphere, vision, and narrative flow is as big a part as breaking necks and inciting a circle pit. The excellent instrumental Along the Coast of Stygia is probably where this stuff peaks- all doomy dual leads and an excellent synth infused coda.

One thing that does make this good is how Mystic Storm manage to avoid any annoying tropes. The vocals, for one - fierce, can hit some good clean notes when she needs to, is clearly moving some air, knows when to shut up. These qualities may not tell of star power necessarily but that puts Anya in the top 10 percentile as far as I'm concerned. The bass has a huge growl to it and is mixed high but just so. The production- raw, but meaty enough, the songwriting nicely varied, big gallops, fun, very melodic leads, a doomy turn on the opener.

All up I'm just surprised how good this is. It was a blind bandcamp download, being stuck in covid isolation and all that, and I wasn't expecting it to survive a second listen. A record that has no business being so much fun. Absolutely an overlooked gem that deserves your attention.