Self-Titled starts with the brutal track “Five Year Winter,” reminding me how much I’d missed new material from Zao. Daniel’s voice is frightening, the guitars and drums revel in their ferocity, and the lyrics are, as always, dark and meaningful, but Zao has also kept their style at the forefront. They’re not all screaming, brutalizing, and abrading. They know how to change-up a metal song to keep it from growing repetitive, and they know how to throw in pauses in the double bass and two-tiered vocals to master effect. “Five Year Winter,” an excellent track, is just the first of ten songs equally as amazing.
The best songs on the album are of varying styles, including the mostly acoustic and extremely haunting "Witchunter,” the instrumental “Alive is Dead” after which they were initially going to name their CD, the melodic then undoubtedly aggressive “A Tool to Scream,” and the multi-dimensional “The End of His World.” That’s not to say any of the other tracks on this album are lacking, unless one may look down their nose at “FJL,” a short, melodic piece, an apparent love story, that isn’t so impressive. I have nothing against Zao’s melodic material, the piano ballad at the end of Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest strikes a real chord of appreciation, but “FJL” doesn’t meet the same standards.
Fans of Zao’s earlier material will be greatly satisfied with Self-Titled, and they’ll also be glad to see that Zao didn’t go in the same direction as Training for Utopia and Anguish Unsaid with their latest albums, adding the now trendy electronic pulses for added dimension (though they really just destroyed the albums). Zao is still pure metal, no electronics to be heard, and they’re all the better for it.
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