STORMCROW is a Black Metal quartet coming out of Italy. They first hit the charts with their debut "Disposition to Tyranny" back in 2012. And now, seven years later, they are presenting their sophomore album "Face the Giant".

Inside the album lie 8 tracks, having the sound of old and classic Black Metal infused with some modern touches. Like any other Black Metal albums, there's a really dense and heavy dark atmosphere provided by the bass and rhythm guitars. However, everything in it sounds too generic. The guitar riffs, the rhythm of the drums, and the vocal delivery. Everything is textbook based, and that results to a lack of excitement in between songs. Of course, it makes the entire album too predictable, as the songs also follow a fixed song structure. In terms of production, it is also a bit frustrating. You like how thunderous the bass is, but sometimes because it is way above the mix, it tends to bury the vocals behind. The vocals itself has a bit of an issue, as it sounds over-engineered. The vocals were too distorted to the point that it becomes too uncomfortable at times.

And while it is undoubtedly pure Black Metal, there are moments where they were too melodic for the genre, especially in the tracks "Black Mother" and "Empty Eyes". And lastly, that one thing about the songs that made it difficult to cope up with is the song length. Even if the songs average a length of five minutes, it feels like the songs were very long due to the insufficient amount of musical ideas present in every track. But in spite of all of that, I definitely think that this is not a bad album at all. There might not be too many memorable moments, but there is an obvious presence of talent within the musicians - it's only that they were not really able to exploit it. The songwriting is average, but better production would have really kicked this album's rating.