Anderson Soares

Anderson Soares — Brazilian drummer — is part of Dark Avenger, the Curitiba band that built an identity in Brazilian metal outside its generation's pattern. While most Brazilian metal of the 1990s and 2000s followed the European power metal model — speed, high notes, constant double bass — Dark Avenger did the opposite: slow tempos, heavy atmosphere and long songs built as narrative. The Arthurian cycle of the two Tales of Avalon volumes and the dark tone of The Beloved Bones: Hell (2017) are the clearest examples. For the drums that means a different function. Instead of sustaining speed, one has to sustain tension — keeping weight and a sense of advance in songs that unfold slowly, without resorting to the genre's most obvious device. It is work of dynamics and of choosing what not to play. Dark Avenger has only four records in more than twenty years, and each is treated as a closed work. Few Brazilian bands have managed to sustain a conception so much their own for so long.