Ah, Black Metal, the only genre of music where you can picture a pack of wolves in the snow with 3 or 4 corpse-paint fueled men following them with their ridiculous poses. Well boy, you were wrong. In this case, the all female black metal act from Armenia DIVAHAR, will send shivers down your spine with their fast-paced, vicious sounding blast beats and gritty storm bringing vocals!

Kicking off their debut "Divarise" is the track "Shadows". Within the first few seconds I can already close my eyes and picture a beautiful scene of mountains with corpse painted women standing on the top screaming at the sky. The riffs, the vocals, the drums, the synth, EVERYTHING involved in this bands music already reminds me of early Norwegian Black Metal bands such as EMPEROR and DIMMU BORGIR. You can feel in the song itself that this band brings a lot of energy for a Black Metal band, which is usually quite hard to do now days because let's face it, someone shouting SATAN for 8 minutes with chords and blast beats is not exactly original.

"Blindness" creeps up next with a very chilling synth/string piece in the background of the song making it that little bit more atmospheric. DIVAHAR are already proving that they are more than capable at writing Black Metal the way it should be without it sounding like it was recorded through a sock with a hive of bees nearby. The chunky riffs, and low grizzly vocals add much more darkness to the already dark sound they have. Way to go girls!

Suddenly I closed my eyes and prepared myself for the next song on the album; "Call Of The Fire" did not seem to disappoint as it starts off like it was written by an orchestra that would have played for the Joker. The heaviness and tightness of the girls from DIVAHAR clearly shows that they want to explore more of the music behind Dev's evil vocal. Unlike a lot of bands that add Synth work into Black Metal, DIVAHAR are really trying their best to keep you entertained as you blast your way through the snow.

As much as the music in this album is really well done and keeping me very entertained so far, it feels like something is missing that I'm hoping appears at a later point in the album.

The first single from the album is next, it is called "Alien;" the music is still very tight and well produced for black metal, but it still is missing something that the first 2 songs on the album had.  I'm not sure what it is but either way, the fast blasts and tremelo picked gutiars are still plowing through with gritty vocals to match.

DIVAHAR's only small problem seems to be that they write long songs but instead of having a lot of variaitons to fill the long song length, it seems like they just prolong the material to deliberately make long songs. Like I said the music is very entertaining and vocals are also really good for black metal, but it's just missing something.  Something that's stopping it from going from "This is pretty cool" to "OH MY SATAN THIS IS SO AWESOME I WANT TO RUN AROUND THE WOODS WITH EXCITEMENT!"

Just over the halfway mark, "Ravenstone" comes into the picture with slow paced riffs followed by atmospheric melodies from the synth side of things. They are pulling themselves up a little bit more but it still feels like they can be doing a lot more for themselves as they clearly do have the talent to write something special here.

"Into The Heights" starts off with a synth line followed by a chuggy riff, that seems like they wrote this song early on in their careers. It doesn't really bring any energy like the rest of the songs on this album have which really disappoints me because I was hoping for a lot more by this point, but now it's just blasts, tremolo picked riffs and black metal vocals with synth.

As this album almost reaches the end of its run, "Areakan" almost feels like it was rushed to finish, but all the riffs and structure of the song are really enjoyable, I just wish there was something different in there to make it stand out. The long song length is again abused with something that could have been a lot more impressive and mind blowing, instead it's just 5 minutes of something that has been dragged out. (How did they manage to do that?)

Finally, we come to the end of the album with "Insane Silence" and unfortunately, I can't say anything more than that the music the band produces is just average black metal with occasionaly beautiful pieces of piano music.

Personally, the musicianship of the band is really tight and they perform really well, its just a big shame the music feels like it's been stretched, thus making it kind of boring after the first 2 or 3 tracks. If your a fan of DIMMU BORGIR then give it a try and see if you like it. Just be prepared.