Band:	Cavus
Album:	The New Era
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	April 11, 2018
Guest review by:	Metren

01. The New Era
02. Killtech
03. Divine Power
04. I Watch You Die
05. Morphine
06. Calling The Flames
07. The Strength Of Hatred
08. Presence Of Existence
09. Come To Me Shadows
10. There Will Be Blood

Cavus's studio debut, Fester And Putrefy, was a heavy, fast-paced, brutal, and - most importantly - rather enjoyable album that showed a lot of promise for the future, as well as demonstrating some already present skill with regard to instrumentation and songwriting. The follow-up, The New Era, reeks of laziness and pretty much screams, "It had been 8 years, we needed to release something".

With the exception of the (very appropriately titled) track "Morphine", which alone begins to approach "good enough" territory, there is barely anything to enjoy about this album. The songwriting simply isn't there and even the production seems to have taken a small step backward when compared to Fester And Putrefy. For example, the snare sound that was already thin on the debut album is barely audible on some of the tracks here and a lot of the melody in the riffs is difficult to focus on because it all sounds muddy, even by black metal standards.

The New Era is performed competently enough, but the weak musical ideas and poor production make it an album that sounds annoying rather than badass and that you'd never play to someone as an introduction to black metal, as that person would likely go: "THAT'S black metal? It just sounds like noise", and while in the case of great black metal albums you'd say (regardless of the quality of those albums' production): "No, it isn't just noise!", here you'd almost feel inclined to go: "Yeah... it kind of is...".

Cavus's 2nd album isn't the worst album ever and it isn't even anywhere close to truly bad, it is just something you'd not listen to more than once unless you're already a hardcore fan of the band. Their debut album was a worthy effort, but this New Era of pure laziness is unlikely to bring too many new black metal fans to their cause.