Band:	In Lupus Pacis
Album:	Strength
Style:	Gothic black metal
Release date:	2000
A review by:	Pierre Tombale

01. My Misery (The Crushing Machine)
02. The End Of Time
03. Wanderer Of The Mind (The Road Less Travelled)
04. Strength

In Lupus Pacis - Strength is a rather short (four tracks) release, from the predecessing Leiden around Wilfried Rabin, responsible for guitars, grunts and drum/keyboard programming on the record. His fellow is Serge Courties on bass and vocals too. The two frenchman combine the synthesized sounds and grunts to a kind of industrial black metal.

Especially on the song 'The End Of Time' the keyboarding and drumming on the intro reminds you more of electro than black metal, but since the growling vocals everything is clear. This track also features passages, that are slow and melodic, where as most parts in all songs are underlined with trembling double bass at enormously quick pace. The opening song My Misery is a good example, the programming which guarantees a constant speed at this tempo adds to the mood provided by deeeeep grunts. In a whole keyboard and drumming make it a quite solid release, which could have been much worse, but luckily the songs are not as annoying as I anticipated, since black and death metal are not my style. Wanderer Of The Mind even seems to have a nice line of keyboards accompanying the staccatto speed riffing.
'Strenght' itself is an instrumental outro track, quite and dark, with the mighty sound of a kettledrum, only the guitarline is very repetitive, too much for a song of almost three and a half minutes if you ask me.

3 in 4 songs on the record begin with electronic arrangement, that would in the first place make you think of something different than the evil black metal it turns out to be. In a whole it is worth a 6.0, due to the fact that still black metal is not my style and the mix turns out to be quite strange at times. The mini-album was recorded in Hell On Earth Studios by Stéphane Vanstean, who is himself guitarist and vocalist in the bands 'Discarded' and 'Downfall'. Released under the french label Autumn Productions