The world of aggressive music is vast indeed, and it stretches far past the United States.  The UK has brought us great bands like the godfathers of grind NAPALM DEATH, our neighbors Canada have blessed us with awesome bands like ION DISSONANCE, LENG T'CHE, and the almighty DESPISED ICON, and now Nepal has bestowed to us the spiritually profound brutality that is DYING OUT FLAME.

The quartet hail from Nepal's capital of Katmandu, where they've spent the last 3 years carving out a name for themselves in the metal scene and developing their signature sound.  Much like Greensville, South Carolina's own NILE (who they'll most likely be compared to), DYING OUT FLAME play a very expressive mix of Middle Eastern-influenced death metal, complete with eerie sounding sitars (albeit beautifully played), rhythmic chanting, and seductive female vocals in Nepalese.  This of course is against a backdrop of your typical "cookie monster" growls, heavy riffs, and blistering fast double bass and blast beat drumming.

Make no mistake, DYING OUT FLAME is rather straight forward death metal, but for the average death metal listener, you'll have to give it a honest to goodness chance.  From the opening track of Shiva Rudrastakam, entitled "Praise of the Omnipresent One", you're quickly made aware that this will not be your typical death metal record.  It's rather jarring.  Not in an "opening-track-from-any-given-ORIGIN-CD" kind of way, but extremely moody and outer worldly.  This isn't like that really quiet song that most metal bands typically make their opening track in order to appear "mysterious".  Listeners with short attention spans will likely roll their eyes to the song's emotive tendencies and skip straight to the title track, but others will stay for this appetizer and be rewarded, as it sets up the entire theme of the CD quite nicely.

While the previous track may have gained the listener's curiosity, "Shiva Rudrastakam" now has a death grip on their attention.

"Ahh, okay THIS is more like it!"

All the typical goodies are here.  Gautam's vocals are rich and sound like he's drinking blood right out of a skull. The guitar work from Chaudhary and Pahadi is rather typical metal shreddary, and not quite as technical as some of the guitar work from NILE's Karl Sanders, but it works for what DYING OUT FLAME are doing.  The drumming of Prachanda Amatya (so glad I don't have to try to pronounce this) is excellent, and is the essential percussive force that this album exists on.  Honestly, even with headphones on, the presence of Gautam's basswork is almost invisible throughout the CD, which is a shame because together with the drumming, this album could probably be heard six houses down.  Instead, it almost sounds like there isn't any bass in the mix at all.  We can just chalk that up to poor recording, and hope that DOF's next release will be mixed and mastered to bring that heaviness to the forefront a bit more, especially on tracks like "Eternal Mother of Great Time".  It's like a porterhouse steak sitting on a Styrofoam plate.  It's all there, just not delivered all that well.

DYING OUT FLAME is anything but run of the mill death metal, and other bands should definitely take notice.  "Rudrastakam" is a strong release, but for this band to really make their mark, they need a follow-up recording that truly captures the beauty, brutality, and technical prowess that they have to offer.