Upon The Altar - Absid Ab Ordine Luminis

Well, this time I review an album from polish band called Upon The Altar. They are active since 2019 in Tarnow, Molopolskie and they've introduced themselves as a blackened death metal band and I think they are mostly black metal but they’ve tried to do death metal's specifications in their songs. Anyway, this is their debut full-length album which has been named "Absid Ab Ordine Luminis".

So if I want to say a general sentence for this stuff, it's not my type at all. Quality is one of the most important elements for me and many other people to be a fan of a band and give a listen to their songs. In general, because of the quality of the album, we can call it as a raw black-death metal.

All of the instrumentals are nasty and unclean and I think you will suffer from headache after listening to two or three songs of it. as you finish listening the first four tracks it seems that they are the same in most of the parts and they've did some effects to show it as a specific songs.

Guitars are hidden and obscure most of the time and bass are the same, I think bass lines are just boom-boom and whom-whom sounds. Sometimes you can hear some nasty noises which bother you.

Drums are repetitive and so loud and one of the reasons that you can't listen to songs is the sound and the volume of drums. You can hear the same drums from the first track to the end of the fourth track.

But in track five which is called 'Blasphemare Absens Fides' the song's structure is a little different from the other songs and I liked this song. Variation, sound effects and all the sections and sentences are great and it's my favorite song, technically. This song is really special because it is not the same with the other four songs before.

Track six is 'Absid Ab Ordine Luminis' and it's a good song either but the problem is the drum's line which is repetitive again in some parts and I think they could do much better some times.

The last one is the same with the other four tracks.

Vocals are mostly black and they are 90s style of black metal like Mayhem. Low quality and harsh it's seems that they've recorded it with a mp3 player and then put a powerful reverb on it. I don't get any death metal feeling from vocals at all.

Sound effects (I mean synthesizer, piano, keyboard or whatever you can hear) are good.

I think they call themselves as a black-death metal band because they play some death metal riffs and some chika-chika drum lines and some blast beats.

I think they can do much better than this for the next stuff. I really advise them to work on their quality and do something more unique. I really like to listen to high-quality music from them. I've listened to this album twice and it was like 4-5 hours working in a mine.

2 / 5 STARS


1. Crown Of Weaknes
2. Wolves Of Napalm
3. Expire
4. Mortuus Est Rex
5. Blasphemare Absens Fides
6. Absit Ab Ordine Luminis
7. Hapax Legamenon