Black Metal is always welcome to my ears, if it is good and grim of course! MALSAIN is the third band I review from Dark Essence Records (Karisma's subdivision). RAVENCULT's ice-cold assault was really nice and DIMENSION F3H's Industrial Black/Thrash was great as well. Now that a legacy is created, it would be really rude from MALSAIN to spoil the whole atmosphere.

MALSAIN stands for sick, disturbing and suffocating ambience in French. At least that's what I read somewhere. AltaVista's translator has a different opinion. Anyway, even though I haven't had the chance to listen to their debut album They Never Die (also on Dark Essence), which was released in 2004, the promo note says that the band has developed a lot since then. By checking the press tab in their official homepage, I saw that it was flooded with great reviews from many magazines and webzines. I hope they are as good as they seem.

The Norwegian black metallers may have received a great feedback from the press but it seems they didn't manage to impress me the way they did with other journalists. The Disease is a decent Black Metal album full of really nice and misanthropic melodies, but I think I have heard the same things being played many times from other bands. There is nothing groundbreaking in this album and nothing that can make the band's music common, yet really interesting. I didn't even understand where the hell someone could find this doomy and claustrophobic extreme metal sound they are talking about! One nice thing I found in The Disease was Herbrand Larsen's (ENSLAVED) production. The sound is really good and avoids the shitty underground Black Metal rules.

The band shows some great potential to create something much more interesting and original. Norwegian Black Metal has showed some great stuff and MALSAIN can enter this category if they try a bit harder.