Karlahan – Exile
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Karlahan is a melodic death metal band from Barcelona, Spain, with symphonic and progressive elements, that ostensibly creates calm, lucid and transcendental atmospheres, with the serenity of snow wolves, longing for a restful place to spend winter. Exile, their most recent work, has ten beautiful songs, plus a bonus track, that really summarizes their work, and what they have been trying to say.
With impressive and intelligent lines of guitar, that harmonically fits the vocals with a convergent path of melodic precision, their style driven by a pure, clean and classic outbreak of metal is outlined by their mathematical concept of symmetry, apparently seeking to align all their diversified sonorous elements altogether, uniting them in a frame of melodic opacity, looking to freeze hallucinatory paradises, to condense them into moments of derisive destitution.
Nevertheless, despite all of the technically driven musicality present in the album, in my personal view, life and spontaneity was lost, and severely absent. The album, defined more for a specific audience, is certainly no minor or mediocre work, but seemed to be stuck on its own sonorous proposal, with all the tracks, more or less, appearing to be only repeating variations of the same song. The creative energy was somewhat static along the way, although I should point it out that this album would certainly achieve all the great scores with the proper audiences, with potential to find enthusiasts among favorites, specifically into the more melodic and clear scale of harmonically driven sound devotees.
I personally have found this work to be too homogeneous. Although different elements are mixed together in a very persistent and coherent style, nothing has surprised me. In my personal evaluation, Exile is too much of an ordinary album to deserve any compliment, tough this does not mean that I classify this work as bad or mediocre. This album certainly has the potential to please a specific audience, obviously, but I firmly disregard this record as a work of art. Its lacks certain vital elements, like spontaneous energy, creative flow, and a vibrating impulsive sincerity begging for life. For the most part, it seems that the musicians, at a certain point, lacking enthusiasm, have given up the record, but kept on playing, in the automatic pilot, so to speak. Seems to me that lacks passion, vigor, enthusiasm and energy. So what we have here is a somewhat rather simplistic album, exceedingly homogeneous, with songs that sound the same, playing over and over again. To summarize in a few words, not a bad album, but exceptionally boring, to say the least. I can't hear it again. Sounds terrifyingly monotonous to me.
​Wagner