Active for a year in the extreme scene, Northern Irishmen The Crawling release their first work, this excellent three-track ep, which will make old school deathsters, especially those who prefer cadenced rhythms and slow rhythms bordering on doom, weep blood. The trio composed of Andy Clarke (guitar and vocals), Stuart Rainey (bass and vocals) and Gary Beattie on skins, in about twenty minutes presents us with its sound, very engaging and with dark overtones, dramatic and evocative, a slow pace that does not disdain beautiful acoustic interludes, monolithic death parts in a very suggestive dark and melancholic atmosphere. The opener The Right To Crawl immediately enters the heart of the band’s proposal, darkening extreme metal that does not disdain short accelerations and cut in two by a beautiful acoustic interlude. The two voices, a cavernous growl and an abrasive scream, accompany us in the spectral landscape drawn by the band’s music, while End Of The Rope sounds so much like Katatonia, and the cold winter embraces us, between the elegant gait of the semi-acoustic beginning and the anger expressed in moments of violent electricity. The last track is the most varied of the trio of tracks on offer, a slow funereal march punctuated by the slow blows that Beattie inflicts on the drumkit, before it all turns metallic again with the entry of the six-string. Catatonic is made up of monolithic riffs, the atmosphere becomes funereal and the evocative seesaw between intimate moments and death rushes gives the track a gloomy aura made even darker by the onset of a thunderstorm. Katatonia, My Dying Bride and early Paradise Lost are the reference bands for The Crawling‘s sound, which in any case is appreciated for the excellent atmospheres and the good personality, absolutely to be listened to if you are a lover of such sounds, promoted. (A.Centenari, MetalEyes 15/12/2015)

2015 – GrindScene Records