MaYan is a Dutch Supergroup and was founded by the Man behind Epica and early After Forever Mark Jansen and Ex-After Forever’s keyboardist Jack Driessen.
Mark and Jack enlisted Henning Basse and Laura Macri on Vocals, Frank Schiphorst on Guitars, and Epica’s Rob van der Loo on Bass, and Arien van Weesenbeek on Drums. Mark Jansen sticks to only death vocals on this album and with Jack responsible for all orchestration.
After the success of their first album “Quarterpast” it is a natural thing for the band to release their second album “Antagonise” which shows diversity between Death Metal and Symphonic Metal. MaYan has been described and Melodic Death Metal with a progressive twist and the album is exactly that it’s heavy and diverse. The album starts off with a full-blown assault of heaviness with “Bloodline Forfeit” which I honestly thought was Devin Townsend due to how heavy the song is and vocals. Mark and Henning do a good job in switching between death screaming and clean and rough vocals which break the song up. A good thing about this album is that it’s not just all full-blown heaviness and the Symphonic and Orchestration on the album are major influences of this for example the song “Insano” is just straight out an operatic soothing piece of music, Laura Macri does a fantastic job with her vocals certainly shows her talent and power. This album also has guest musicians such as Dimitris Katsoulis playing violin, Simone Simons from Epica, and Floor Jansen reuniting with her former After Forever bandmates to some guest vocals. Listening to this album a couple of times it seems them has to do something about anger towards corrupt and secret governments.
Overall this album is a great attempt at doing something different which some good stand-out tracks, Burn your witches, Enemies of Freedom, Insano, and Devil in Disguise. All stand-out tracks have their own value to the album.
This album has a great mixture of heaviness and diversity though I think some of the track order could have been better.
MaYan: Facebook
Release Year: 2014
Label: Nuclear Blast
Category: Album
Country: Netherlands
Reviewed by Brent Logan
