Candlelight Records

In a just and fair world one would not be forced to wait eight whole years for legendary bands to release substantial new material. This, my friends, is not a just and fair world.

2001's Tara  was, and still remains, a masterpiece monument of metal. It showed us Absu reaching a level that only the greats ever reach, consistently reminding us of their greatness and amazing accomplishment through out the duration of the album. This is not to imply that Absu had not achieved greatness before this release, because they very clearly had. But Tara felt like the realization of all possibilities within the band up to that point. After the tidal wave of awesome that was Tara  finally subsided and gave people room to breath again and recover from whiplash and broken necks, we awaited the next masterpiece. And we waited some more. And then some obscure and hard to find mini releases were let out, as well as a best-of compilation as a sort of teaser, to remind us that Absu still existed and withheld its powers from our sight.  But a new full length album of all new Absu material was not appearing on the horizon for quite a while.

Moribund Records

To my knowledge there's not a whole lot of metal going on in the Middle East. As far as I know, most bands don't tour to play in the Middle East, so living there would not seem to be conducive to playing metal. But now my limited knowledge on Lebanon's metal activity tells me that they at least sure as hell get a lot of metal distributed to the people in some form or fashion, because a band like Ayat does not pop up out of the absence of metal, punk, crust and total aural fury... unless it comes into existence for this very reason. However, a band like Ayat could only exist in a place like the Middle East, bred by the rampant hatred and hostilities of conflicting nations. War is in their blood, and this blood is all over their back yard.

 Having released nothing but two EP's and a string of demos over the last 9 years, Ayat is a relative no-name in modern metal. One could not expect anything more, considering the land the band calls home. How they have managed to record and release ANYTHING without being found, arrested, and sentenced to a bizarre Muslim punishment is a mystery to me. You've got to hand it to these guys - they are truly dedicated to their hateful, anti-religious stance more so than you can say for any other metal band of note. Metal bands in America, Germany, Canada, Scandinavia, France, England, Mexico, etc... will not be hunted down, stripped of rights and thrown into prison for what they say and write about religion, or Allah or Islam. Ayat will. With Six Years of Dormant Hatred Ayat have unleashed what sounds more like six centuries of dormant hatred, misanthropy and disgust.