Release: 18-06-2010
Label: Nuclear Blast Records

By Laetitia

Just a few months ago, Equilibrium announced the departure of their former singer Helge Stang and drummer Manuel and introduced us to the new guys Robse & Hati. In between a few shows the band has been busy with recording their new album ‘Rekreatur’. You are already able to listen to the album on Equilibrium’s myspace and in a few days the disc will be available for purchase.

The first thing you notice about the album that Equilbrium still has their own typical sound. And at the start, it’s not even really noticeable that the band changed singers. Robse’s grunts sound quite like Helge’s, until’ he starts grunting deeper. A perfect example of this is the song ‘Verbannte Erde’. You can easily hear that Robse is able to produce a much lower grunt than Helge. He uses this vocal style throughout almost the entire song. The song reminds a lot of a soundtrack.

‘Die Affeninsel’ is probably the first song you’ve heard from the new album since it was on Myspace first. The song is probably the happiest song on the album, in the same style as ‘Unbesiegt’, from the second album Sagas. (Though ‘Unbesiegt’ is simply better).

‘Der Wassermann’ is also a song that needs to be mentioned, you can hear for youself why (In my opinion it’s one of the best songs on the album). In ‘Aus Ferner Zeit’ you can hear Gaby Koss (ex-Haggard) sings some ‘nanana’s,’ which don’t really fit in the song.  They should have given her different lines to sing. On Sagas you have ‘Mana’, and on Rekreatur you have ‘Kurzes Epos’. The song lasts for about thirteen minutes and is just like Mana, instrumental. It’s a diverse song and sounds pretty good, but lost the competition with Mana.

Equilibrium still sounds like Equilibrium. Most of the songs are cheerful and fast. Though their style changed a little bit. They got rid of the really bouncy folk metal and have become more epic and soundtrack-like combined with metal. Rekreatur has a few nice songs but does not measure up to it’s predecessors.

Rating: 6.5/10

Tracklist:

1. In Heiligen Hallen
2. Der Ewige Sieg
3. Verbrannte Erde
4. Die Affeninsel
5. Der Wassermann
6. Aus Ferner Zeit
7. Fahrtwind
8. Wenn Erdreich Bricht
9. Kurzes Epos

Link
Official
Myspace