Some bands are still in love with the past. Sometimes, this passion could be something very bad for a work, due the missing feeling for an era that is already gone. But sometimes, this passion and feeling can lead to something very good. And in the case of the German Black Metal quartet KERKER, it really creates something musically tasteful, as their first album, "A Dime for the Bleak Faces", is really to proof.

Here, the old feeling from the SWOBM is alive, pulsing with life and energy, the same darkened and morbid feeling we still feel in classical albums as MAYHEM's "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas", DARKTHRONE's "Under a Funeral Moon" and EMPEROR's "In the Nightside Eclipse", with that very technically simple way of creating music, but always having a very good result when used by wise hands of theirs. The vocals are shrieked in a way that reminds Aldhran in his earlier works on DODHEIMSGARD, but with some agonizing clean voices in some points, very good and catching riffs, powerful and heavy rhythmic session, and even some keyboards as we hear on the fabulous "Prague". They cannot be the most original band in the world, I agree, but their work is very good, indeed.

The sound quality is that one that Black Metal fans who know the style deeply are used: raw and harsh. But don't be disturbed: of course you'll understand what they are playing and their music entirely.

Morbid and somber, their seven songs are all good, but we can point as their best moments the harsh and fast "Dethronement of Old Kings" (fast in the view of the SWOBM, with a fine work done by the guitars), the morbid "Sighisoara Winter", the sinister and catching "Prague" (with some somber melodies on guitars, a touch of elegance given by keyboards interventions, some clean and whispered voices in the middle of a musical Black Metal massacre), the abrasive "Douleur Oblige" (fine work on drums and bass guitar in another song with melodies), and "His Fairway Left Decay".

Hear it, and love it.<