Zubrowska, the name alone reeks of vodka, too many broken nights and head-splitting hangovers. Oddly enough, they do not hail from Russia but from la belle France. If they came up with that name on a booze-filled evening I don’t know but the result is sure as hell material for an excruciating headache.

The 10 tracks on “Family Vault” show resemblance to the jazzy-grindcore-death metal genre that is gaining popularity rapidly. Bands like The Dillinger Escape Plan, Cephalic Carnage, Converge and to a lesser extent Cryptopsy and Dying Fetus all have that ‘twenty-good-ideas-crammed-into-one-song”-complex, spinning and turning through tempo changes, rhythm changes and vocal styles. Zubrowska is an exponent of this subgenre but instead of twenty, they’re trying to put like thirty ideas into one song and the result is a bit too overwhelming for the senses.

Sure, it sounds really aggressive and the individual pieces are great, these guys can play fucking tight and the vocals are very diverse (a bit alike to Gorerotted, now that I think of it) but the transitions between the parts of the tracks are many times too abrupt. It takes away the cohesion of the album and this is certainly a thing they can improve upon.

Having said that I can conclude that I like this album and that it shows some real potential, let’s hope that this will bear fruit with the next release.