old school Death Metal / Folk from Germany released in 1994
The sound of Dark Reality was something different and new in early 90's and originally didn't find its own place in the metal scene, but after some years this genre managed to find some fans, and even other bands tried to playsimilar genres.
Considered the first real folk metal work in modern style as the fans know, Umbra Cineris contains unusual metal elements, such as horns, pipes and many acoustic parts between the death metal guitars, with lyrics sung both in growl and clean, in alternate performance, and is even possible to hear some dark wave sounds similar to the British bands in the late 70's.
Of course, another thing that is impossible to ignore, are the lyric themes of this album, something "partially" new for the metal scene, originally employed in the early '80 by the great fathers of heavy metal that were influenced by the epic sound, tales of religion, passion, love, death and various Medieval themes were left behind in the late '80 and replaced with modern and "urban" themes, but Dark Reality made a very original choice for its period (if fact in the mid 90's only few bands in their songs talked about those themes, only in the power or speed metal scene), but Andres Waldura took for the band this way until the end of activity.
It was a time of new research in the whole metal scene, from death, to heavy, from black, to speed, and only few years before, even if only unoficially was born a new metal genre called "Viking", and all the new and underground bands was trying to find the way to be original and different from all the other bands, especially from the previous generations. Probably for this reason Dark Reality, maybe inspired even by the story of their nation and in European tales in general tried to attach traditional and folk instruments to the more classical death metal music, with a discrete success at that time, but after many years they could be considered without any problems true pioneers of an alternative metal style, that in less than 20 yeas became one the most influent (especially for the Underground fans in Europe).
Because of the premature end of the activity, Dark Reality is nowadays one of the less known folk metal bands the whole scene, and even if the next works are different from this one, I recommand this record to everyone who is interested to discover folk metal and especially its origins (this record shows only a small part on how folk metal was in origin) lost around the world there are other incredible works close to folk metal produced in early 90's but for me this one is unique.
In the end, maybe my point rating seems too much generous, but the talent and passion of Andres Waldura and friend gave me the possibility to appreciate the great art of research in music.
Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
