HISTORY
This band started out as a death-metal band directed towards the melodic scene, this band comes from France and was created in 1995. This band is called
Yykoon, but this band is not like other extreme-metal bands, these guys has changed their sound from album to album and sometimes the changes has been pretty radical. The band mixes music styles like black, death and thrash-metal, and with these genres forged into one they have come a long way in their career. They also use dual vocal styles, one calm and melodic voice and a deep growling vocal style, this combination turns out to be very lethal with their melodic, heavy and catchy sound.
ALBUM INFORMATION
Wll what can I say about this album...it's great! This album is called
''Dying Sun'', I have been searching for this album for a long time and I didn't know what to expect. This album appears to have a platform of some sort of thrash and progressive-metal foundation, and on top of that there is a death and black-metal based construction. The album contains alot of melodic moments, heavy and catchy thrash-based formulas, melodic and skillfully played power-metal solos and then you have the grim, deep growling and the more melodic and calmer voice. There is also sound effects included here, it sounds like symphonic and/or keyboard elements, typical elements that you can find in the power-metal genre and maybe in the melodic death-metal genre. The lyrics is nothing special, this band focus their lyrics most on the occult and evil themes, there is nothing that points towards the more peaceful themes like love or peace-on-the-earth stuff.
THE BAND MEMBERS
This album was created by a group of five members, we begin with
Stéphane Souteryand and he is responsible for the guitars and vocals. His vocals are very good, though the vocals appears to have been edited but who cares, you have both these old-school death-metal growls, and then you have these more balanced, melodic and calmer power-metal based vocals. This type of vocal work was very interesting and somewhat unique for a ''extreme-metal band''. The guitars are performed by
Stéphane and
Francois Falempin, the guitar work has a huge amount of riffs, shredds and solos. Most of the time they played thrash-metal based riff lines, I must be honest and tell you that I can't hear any signs of death or black-metal elements in the guitar work. But they do a great work with the guitars, every song is catchy in some way because the riffage is melodic, catchy and has a very good variety.
Geoffrey Gautier is also a guitarist! I totally forgot about him, I have already described the others so I don't have much to add about this memder, the rhythm and lead work is excellent in this album, its the best way I can describe the overall guitar work.
Voctproen is the bassist in this band, a very good performance done here, maybe not a standout bassist but he has a very audible bass. You can hear the bass lines pretty good and you can hear some small bass filler sections throughout the album.
Laurent Harrouart is the drummer, this man knows how to handle the drums. The patterns has a great amount of variety, from fast and heavy double-kicking to more calmer (but still pretty fast) patterns, basically every song has great drum work and all of them are very catchy. I think that the drumming is the only thing alongside the vocals that makes this band sound like a death and/or black-metal band.
MY THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS ALBUM
If you are looking for a band that does have extreme elements but still doesn't sound so extreme you should check this album out. I liked this album very much, one reason why I got hooked by this album was the multiple metal-ingredients. You could hear that this album was a huge mix of different metal genres, I could find up to five different genres like thrash-metal, death-metal and power-metal to mention some of them. A second thing I really liked was the vocal work, songs like
Fight Of The Titan and
The Clans are some examples of songs where you can experience this kind of vocal combination. First you have these aggressive death growls and later you have half-melodic power-metal vocals, very enjoyning I must say. Well I guess that I could mention one more thing that I enjoyed, lets take the song patterns. The songs were all very good structured, I would say that all songs were catchy more or less, every song had huge influences of thrash and power-metal.
Thrash 'em All contained lots of thrash and death elements (similar to
Testament's work).
Stolen Souls felt more like a power-metal influenced song, most because of the somewhat calm and melodic tempo, I can just say that you will at least get hooked by three or four songs, or even the whole album.
MY CONCLUSION
Sorry but I couldn't find any bad things about this album. I saw this band on one of those metal-encyclopedia sites on internet, I scrolled here and there and saw this wierd name
Yyrkoon. I was heavily attracted to thrash-metal when I saw this band, I started to search for this album for at least a year or even two. I finally found it and I was stunned, the album didn't felt extreme even though that the band had with extreme metal genres in their baggage. The entire album was filled with energetic, heavy and catchy songs, if you like thrash, death, black or power-metal you will like this album, I pretty sure because this album covers so many different sorts of music elements. Though there are no ballads in this album, just two short instrumental songs that might seem uninteresting but the rest of the songs are pure entertainment (like headbanging). Thanks for taking time to read this review and I hope this has given you some new ideas and guidance, any comments are welcome.
RECOMMENDATIONS
I will basically recommend this whole album, if you like multiple music styles within the metal genres you have found the right album right here. My final album rating will be a
5/5, I don't see this as ''classic'' though, I gave this a full score because I think that album covers so many sorts of music elements.
, maybe its just bad luck. 
