From Galicia, Spain, the land of Spanish witches, comes the Heavy Metal band DARK EMBRACE that promises to emulate all the mysticism of their local folklore in their latest release Land Of Witches. This is the 4th album from this band and their proposal is an energetic Heavy metal with some Dark Metal vibes. The album starts with “We, The Witches” , which is kind of a power metal tempo track with guttural vocals that sometimes attempt (badly) to scream…The arrangements are quite intricate as you will notice in tracks like “Orcavella” and “The Dark Land” , showing that the band is composed by well seasoned musicians, however, there is nobody credited on the bass, and as a bass player, this hurts me. It would hurt me more if there is no bass in any song and I believe this may be the case as I could not find the bass on “My Darkness End”. Sacrilege!!

Despite the 2 good guitar players Mou Trashno and Markos Villar, there is no excuse not to have a bass. Please don’t come with “we used a keyboard instead…! The album is definitely heavy and full of eerie moods and this is exactly the beginning of the good track “A Blaze In The Sky” that for me takes the best of the album so far. Great guitar riff (still missing the bass sound), and energy. The band also has a competent drummer in Julio G. Valladares as you can hear in “Never Betray You”  with some crazy double bass madness. Power metal speed is also on his CV and it can be heard in the also good “A Place To Hide” that has a nice guitar solo. I would say that the band reminds me of JUDAS PRIEST in some tracks and SLAYER and MERCIFUL FATE in others. ‘Witchtower” follows the album overall theme and I could swear I could hear KING DIAMOND singing in some parts on this tune.

I will dedicate a paragraph to talk about the vocal (and the brain behind this operation) of Oscar Rilo that also plays the cello (!?) when he should be playing bass. When the singer does pure gutural voice is good. When he does a kind of KING DIAMOND, it is good. When he does his clean voice, it is also good. However, when he mix guttural with high pitch vocal lines or screams, it sounds like my 8 year old child having a tantrum in the supermarket. Not good. I believe this should be avoided as sometimes I find the vocals funny and not in sync with the darkness of the album. There are good vocals in a number of tracks like in the last one “In The Snow” that has a mysterious vibe and nice singing lines without much tantrums. In this track, the singer mix the soft with the ruff vocals well, without sounding strange like on a previous track “My Darkness End”. I like the album, but for me it is missing a different vocal approach to match the good instrumentals in some songs. The voice is there and the singer shows that he has a good range, but the delivery in some tracks sounds like the singer of the spoof Metal band MASSACRATION.