Review of the Album Only Our Death Is Welcome by Czech Death Metal Band Krabathor

The album Only Our Death Is Welcome is the debut album by Czech death metal band Krabathor and this is one of those albums that I initially had planned to review but decided against it until today. The album stylistically isn’t as hard-hitting as their 1998 studio album Orthodox but nonetheless what you hear on this album is some pretty creative death metal. Or is it?

The song called Preparing Your End has some terrific guitar play before it shifts into a more traditional death metal style of riffing. Now granted, this may not be the way to start your morning off, but what we hear is some perfectly written death metal that works. The song called Killing My Wrath is about a person whose wounds do not heal with time and he feels like he has been betrayed. However, the song Royal Crown starts off this album and it is a short, symphonic style instrumental song. Lyrically, this album is similar to those older Florida area death metal bands but around 1992, such an approach was typical. The song called Eternal has this sort of progressive style beginning to it (think about a song off of the Fates Warning album The Spectre Within). There are noticeable loud screams in this album. They are not the falsetto kind of screams that you would have heard in early thrash metal albums but the scream of death metal vocals are a little harsher.

The death metal vocals in this album really don’t deviate much from the usual harsh growls and I’ve heard one user on the website called Metal-Archives refer to this album as having boring death metal. Well, that depends on what a music fan of the genre is looking for. If you are looking for the creative, technical type of death metal music that was present in the middle of the 1990’s you will get that to some degree in this album, less so than in the album Orthodox.

We go back to analyzing the song called Preparing Your End and to me, it feels like it has that atmospheric feel to it kind of like the song Empty Words which would be on the 1995 studio album called Symbolic. The song is trying to point out that many people are living ordinary lives that have no value in them however, we do not know for sure what is on the other side when we die. It is best to enjoy our lives while we still have them of course. By this point in the album it does not seem so boring does it? The middle of this song has creative, interesting riffing resembling the song Vacant Planets in a sense before the song returns to its normal riffing structure. There is another instrumental song in this album called Worried Childhood which has an atmospheric feel plus some tapping in it to create an interesting contrast. Overall, this first album by Krabathor is a decent death metal release that has good time changes but it is not as good as their 1998 studio album called Orthodox.

Even so, what is offered on their debut album Only Our Death Is Welcome is respectable and I think we hear a bit of early 1990’s Morbid Angel in the song called Eternal. There is a repetition of the word “eternal” as the death metal style drumming continues incessantly in this song.