Artist: CREMATORY
Album: ANTISERUM (CD)

Year: 2014
Media type: CD

Crematory no longer need to fear comparison with the international competition, Germany’s most popular Gothic Metal Band having earned itself an excellent reputation at home and abroad over the past 23 years. One reason for this is the great recognition value of their songs, along with the band’s characteristic style and their unconditional determination to continue to grow as artists. None of their albums so far is a copy of any of its predecessors; each of them is an independent recording with unique features and fresh ideas.

So if Crematory have decided to pick up the electronic elements from Revolution (2004) on their latest album Antiserum, they do so with different parameters and future-oriented visions. “Our fans can look forward to Antiserum, on which we have gone one step further than we did on our comeback album Revolution in terms of electronic influences,” drummer Markus Jullich explains. “In collaboration with Elmar Schmidt of Hamburg EBM act Centhron, we have come up with a haunting mix of metal riffs and EBM keyboards. That’s why I’d refer to Antiserum’s musical direction as ‘EBM-Metal’.” As homogeneous as the final result may sound, a great deal of concentration was invested throughout to produce the desired result. Markus Jullich confesses: “In the beginning it was more difficult than we’d thought. The sounds and samples that Elmar brought us had no really song structures, that’s why we didn’t have a central theme to start off with.  It took us two or three songs to get in to the groove, but from that point on it was an extremely exciting process to work on the new material.” The Crematory drummer is referring to tracks such as ‘Virus’ with its pulsating EBM flair, ‘Inside Your Eyes’, which consistently and unashamedly professes the desired EBM elements, and the first single release ‘Shadowmaker’, a veritable anthem which continues the long-standing Crematory tradition of including at least one real hit on each album. Markus Jullich: “Even before the whole record was finalized we knew that ‘Shadowmaker’ had absolute hit potential. We never had a moment’s doubt that we had come up with the new Crematory anthem.”

Along with this purposely experimental direction, Antiserum also features a number of tracks which see Crematory rely on their traditional strengths and familiar characteristics. The title song is a perfect example of typical Crematory ingredients, just like ‘Back From The Dead’ and ‘If You Believe’, which could also have featured on either of the two predecessor albums Pray (2008) and Infinity (2010). In view of the convincing result spawned by this ‘Gothic Metal meets EBM’ liaison, we can attest Crematory an even more homogeneous melange of supposedly opposing musical directions than on Revolution. “We were even bolder this time than we were in 2004. We played even more with different sounds and have – in my opinion – cleverly combined real drum parts with electronic patterns. For me as the band’s drummer, it will be really exciting to see how we are going to translate this in a live context. But since it works so well on Antiserum, I’m confident that it will be a really good mix live, too.”By the way: Crematory fans will be able to mark the new live dates in their diary soon. “We’ve had loads of enquiries,” Markus Jьllich enthuses. “So we will go out and tour as much as possible again to give our fans the right antiserum against frustration and tedium.”

TRACKLIST:

1. Apocalyptic Vision
2. Until the end
3. Shadowmaker
4. If you believe
5. Inside your eyes
6. Kommt nдher
7. Irony of fate
8. Virus
9. Back from the dead
10. Welcome
11. Antiserum

LINE-UP:

Felix Stass – vocals
Matthias Hechler – Guitar
Harald Heine – bass
Markus Jullich – drums
Katrin Jullich - keyboards