Some Metallians throughout the world have a strange and nasty mania: they know United States by their Thrash Metal bands, but forget what existed before. To be honest,the Heavy Metal scene on USA was born on the second half of the 1970's. We can name as the first band to have the particular way to play Heavy Metal there was THE RODS. They created what we known as "US Heavy Metal", or describing the thing: a way to play traditional Heavy Metal with very good melodies, a strong dose of weight, but with that technical work so precious to North American musicians back then. That's the main reason you can feel a strong difference when you hear albums from SAXON or SATAN and LIZZY BORDEN and THE RODS. As a rightful heir from US Metal, now it's time to speak about KANTATION's second album, "Nephilim".

We can say that they used a pretty good and technical approach on their music that makes them seem similar to SYMPHONY X's "Paradise Lost", but not as Progressive as Michael Romeo's gang. It's technical, indeed, but heavy and abrasive as a modern traditional Heavy Metal band, with some focus on the dynamic of the arrangements, and with the choruses. Obviously, they aren't creating a new style in Heavy Metal, but they are doing the things on their own way, putting their energy and personality on each one of the album's songs.

The sound quality is fruit of a hard work, because the work done by Bryant Crawford on the engineering and mastering gave a strong power to the album's song, a heavy and abrasive weight, but being clean to the point you can understand all the melodies. And Dušan Marković had done a fine work on the cover art that reflects the band's lyrics.There are many excellent moments on the album, besides the level of the songs is very homogeneous.

The instigating instrumental work heard on "Walk Through Desire" (full of broken tempos and rhythmic changes, what makes their rhythmic kitchen appears a lot. But the chorus is excellent), the abrasive weight heard on "Forget Me" (the vocals are really great, using very good tunes in each moment), the aggressive rhythm heard on "Tragedy" (again a fine work on bass and drums' works, but the guitars are really excellent), "Dying To Live" (another excellent moment from the guitars. The riffs are really great), and the perfect "The Nephilim Suite" (more than 11 minutes of very good rhythmic changes, with excellent and modern melodies) can be named as their great moments. But don't throw away the other ones, because there's an excellent version for SAXON's "Power And the Glory" here.

A very good band, indeed, and I really want to hear more of them in the future.