At first listen, it may seem like with Drifting Through the Void, Svarti Loghin are attempting to jump on the bandwagon of bands like Alcest, Amesoeurs or Lantlôs with their blend of black metal and elements of shoegaze and indie rock. And while certainly there are stylistic similarities between Svarti Loghin and those bands, this Swedish group have clearly carved out their own sound and are pushing the boundaries of black metal in a direction that is all their own.

Of course, the real question with bands such as Svarti Loghin who mix various styles is always “does it work?”. And ultimately, while a couple of the clean vocal parts on the album seemed a bit misplaced, the band’s core approach to songwriting is one of those combinations that just clicks. The guitars are obviously firmly rooted in depressive black metal, crafting very repetitive and hypnotic riffs, but the melodies switch between being contemplative and somewhat depressive to surprisingly uplifting, while the screamed vocals alternately lend an anguished feel and a more hopeful air to the songs. It’s this duality that defines much of the music on Drifting Through The Void, and it works quite well.

Admittedly, the album isn’t perfect. The clean vocals have a weird, almost country vibe to them, which didn’t go well with the rest of the album. Fortunately they only appear briefly in parts of a couple songs. And while the cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Planet Caravan’ isn’t bad, it’s kind of like trying to cover ‘All Along The Watchtower.’ No matter how good Svarti Loghin is, the Pantera version is hard to top.

With Drifting Through The Void, Svarti Loghin have managed to find that perfect middle ground, creating an album of rare beauty and melodicism that doesn’t sacrifice its blackened edge. It’s definitely on the same side of the spectrum as Alcest and the other shoegazey black metal bands that seem to be all the rage right now. It’s rather surprising that they haven’t gotten a great deal of attention, since their debut Empty World was also very good. Hopefully this album will help to fix that.

» Svarti Loghin at MySpace

Aldaaron is yet another example of France’s ability to produce excellent black metal bands seemingly out of nowhere. Hailing from Grenoble in southeastern France near the French alps, Aldaaron mostly adheres to a formula that numerous other bands like Dissection or Belenos have used with much success, but instead of focusing on darkness or outright aggression, debut album Nous Reviendrons Immortels is infused with a melancholic sense of melody and a certain spiritual feel that differentiates it somewhat from other bands playing this style.

Icy melodic tremolo riffing and rapid-fire double bass drumming make up most of the album’s running time, but the band seems to know exactly when to break up the pace with a well-placed clean guitar interlude or half-time passage, so the music rarely gets boring. While nothing on Nous Reviendrons Immortels is particularly groundbreaking, it contains a good balance of furious black metal and softer fare, with some nice touches like echoing spoken word vocals occasionally thrown in to enhance the atmosphere.

All of the tracks were pretty consistently good, but ‘Royaume’ and the evocative ‘En Route Vers La Bataille’ were definite highlights for me. For a debut album, I found Nous Reviendrons Immortels quite impressive. If you’re a fan of cold, melodic black metal then it might be worth trying to chase down a copy of this album.

» Buy Nous Reviendrons Immortels from The End Records

Ptahil’s debut EP Ortus is close to 30 minutes of ritualistic, emotionally-scarring black metal dissonance fueled by Satanic Gnosticism. In other words, definitely something you wouldn’t expect to originate from the Midwestern United States. This trio from Fort Wayne, Indiana combines lyrics from ancient medieval sources with hypnotic black noise, the combined effect of which is to beat the listener’s consciousness into a state of meditative appreciation.

The first track, ‘The infinite TRUTH of the WORD of GOD is translated by corrupt fallen man’, alternates between almost grind-like blackened chaos and more standard blastbeats and tremolo riffs before eventually settling into a slow, creepy section with hateful spoken word incantations. If you’re a fan of Deathspell Omega’s slower-paced compositions like Kenose’s ‘I’ or ‘Diabolus Absconditus’, the effect here is quite similar.

The second track is nearly twice as long as the opener, and spends much of its 19 minutes undulating among doomy disharmonic riffs and creepy choral chanting while vocalists Nacht and Luathca spew forth lyrics taken from the 13th century Latin hymn Dies Irae. Rather than adopt the usual black metal screams, these guys employ kind of a damaged yell, which makes Ortus’s sound much more unique and terrifying.

With Ortus, Ptahil have managed to state their dark philosophical convictions succinctly in two very different but equally effective slabs of moody, sprawling black metal. The sinister atmosphere the EP creates and the aptitude with which Ptahil are able to move between different styles and tempos while maintaining the suffocating sense of foreboding that pervades the album are definitely impressive. The emergence of bands like this is definitely a step in the right direction for US black metal.

» Buy from Stronghold Records

Russian one-man black metal band Stielas Storhett returns nearly three years after releasing their excellent debut album Vandrer… with the new two-song EP Skd. Having been so long since the last release, it’s expected that Stielas Storhett’s sound would have gone through some changes and improvements, but I was definitely not prepared for how different this EP sounds from the debut. The band seems to have completely ditched much of the depressive atmosphere of Vandrer… for a much more open sound. That comes as somewhat of a disappointment for me, since Vandrer… had a very unique and haunting feel to it, but these new songs are not bad by any means, and Stielas Storhett’s new sound does help to accentuate sole member Damien T.G.’s ability to write captivating songs.

The first track, simply titled ‘Skd I’, starts out sounding very Drudkh-like, and immeditately one notices the improvement in production from the previous album. The two songs on Skd have a very modern sound, with the instruments and vocals all very clear. Damien T.G.’s vocals aren’t the greatest, so I found myself wishing the band had stayed with the more distorted, hidden vocal sound of the debut for those, but the other instruments definitely benefit from the change. The drum performance is excellent, and the guitar arrangements are very complex and much more impressive.

‘Skd I’ is full of good blackened mid-paced riffing, while ‘Skd II’, in my opinion the slightly better of the two, contains more of the chugging rhythm sections and beautiful melancholic leads that helped make Vandrer… so effective. Both tracks feature some excellent lead guitar work and a bit of dual guitar interplay while maintaining a strong atmosphere of loneliness and sorrow. After Vandrer… came out I was really looking forward to the next Stielas Storhett release, and while Skd was definitely not what I was expecting, it does nothing to change my high opinion of these guys.

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» Wrath of God
» Under The Three Spheres

In order to play the songs, you’ll need to either have a 7-string guitar or tune your 6-string down to A#. You’ll also need some major chops to play along with Macey’s compositions.

Check out this post on Mithras’s MySpace for more info as well as links to discussions about the tabs on the band’s official forum.

Finland’s Azaghal have been around for quite awhile, Teraphim being their eighth full-length album. Founding member Narqath, who handles contributes guitars and vocals, also later went on to form pagan black metal band Wyrd. On Teraphim the band displays a refined style of black metal that isn’t overly raw, aggressive or melodic, but contains a good balance of these elements.

The first few tracks of the album get things off to a good start, but some things like the melody in opener ‘Elilum - Suuri Tyhjyys’ or the clean vocals in ‘Filosof’ just don’t quite work. Teraphim quickly finds its footing as it progresses however, with several standout tracks like ‘Teraphim - Puhdistava Tuli’, ‘Uhrattu’ and ‘Pimeyden Kutsu’ along the way. ‘Filosof’ starts off with an awesome headbanging riff, while the bridge of ‘Teraphim - Puhdistava Tuli’ contains a devastating palm-muted section that seems to come out of nowhere. The band also displays an uncanny ability to morph their style on different songs. Tracks like ‘Samaelin Kuiskaus’ or ‘XI Omega’ torch your ears with a frenzied tremolo picked black metal assault while ‘Kyy’ is more thrash-based, and the midtempo, melody-driven ‘Hänen Musta Liekkinsä’ is surprisingly effective.

Admittedly, this album took some time to grow on me. The combination of the slightly subpar production and some of the odd touches like clean vocals or the occasional Wyrd-like bluesy solo kind of turned me off at first, and the drums never do much, but as you listen to it more the flow of the songs and the intricate riffing starts to reveal itself more and more. Definitely the more you listen to Teraphim, the more you’ll appreciate it.

» Buy Teraphim from Amazon.com

Finally a metal band woke up and used a painting from one of my favorite artists, Francis Bacon. Seriously, how can an artist who did a series of paintings of popes screaming in agony not have his art used in some fashion by the underground metal scene?

Francis Bacon was a highly successful Irish figurative painter in the 20th century. His artwork is known for its abtract, distorted figures and tortured imagery. He painted a series of works depicting screaming Papal heads or torsos, and other themes included crucifixions and grotesque self portraits or portraits of friends. H.R. Geiger has stated that Bacon’s work was a strong inspirational force behind his creations for the film Alien.

Anyway, the winner (unless there are other bands using Bacon’s work that I’m not aware of) is Prosanctus Inferi, a death metal band who will be releasing their first album Pandemonic Ululations of Vesperic Palpitation later this year. Their album cover uses a portion of Bacon’s Head I painting. Check out the cover art below.

You can learn more about Francis Bacon on Wikipedia, and check out a couple galleries containing some of his work here and here.

Death Obsession is the second full-length from Austin, Texas’s Brown Jenkins. These guys play black metal only in the loosest sense of the word, creating suffocating and entrancing atmospheric music that morphs and evolves organically without any semblance of structure. There is no warmth at all in Brown Jenkins’s sound on this album; the effect is one of utter hopelessness and paranoia, like dark forces swirling around you that are beyond your control.

Like Xasthur or Blut Aus Nord, Brown Jenkins has a sound that is instantly recognizable; the fuzzy production and hypnotic, repetitive riffs and hideous vocal growls create an atmosphere that is completely unique. Main songwriter UA mixes arpeggios and some twisted melodies with shapeless and almost random-sounding guitar work, much of which repeats for a few bars before changing gradually into something else.

The tempo, which works in conjunction with the shifting guitar riffs, is the other really unique aspect of Death Obsession. Other bands will occasionally throw tempo changes into their songs, but Brown Jenkins does it constantly, gradually upping the tempo into a frenzy before slowing things down, and then jarring you with another tempo surge. Despite the changes in speed, the overall dynamics of the music are kept fairly constant, which I think adds to the disorienting effect.

The one problem with Brown Jenkins’s approach on Death Obsession is that every track sounds incredibly similar to all the others. The basic riffing style is the same, the tempo changes several times, some vocals appear here and there, and then it’s more of the same stuff in the next song. That ends up making the album really monotonous after awhile, but then perhaps it was Brown Jenkins’s intent was to barrage the listener with Death Obession’s mind-numbing atmosphere of hatred. Whether you end up liking it or not, this is definitely a disturbing album to listen to.

» Buy Death Obsession from Amazon.com

There’s a fine line in progressive black metal between augmenting the genre’s accepted aesthetic and completely destroying it, and Germany’s Semen Datura are straddling that line proudly on this release. The first actual song ‘Unter Bleigvanen Wolkenlasten’ includes some very traditional black metal elements, but even it has some weird touches. Things really start to get unusual on the fourth track ‘Mental Outlaw’ though - it begins with a creepy intro before suddenly breaking into kind of a blackened industrial beat. Semen Datura’s spastic songwriting is often unpredictable, but they’re good enough musicians that at least a lot of the time, the riffs they are moving between are pretty awesome ones, so the end result is a very entertaining album.

This is one of those albums that is so unique it’s hard to describe it accurately, but rest assured that if you enjoy bands outside the norm of black metal like Lux Occulta, Todtgelichter or Ved Buens Ende, you’ll most likely dig Einsamkeit. Some of Semen Datura’s guitar riffing actually sounds pretty close to the riffing style on Todtgelichter’s last album Schemen, but there are also passages that sound like a more disturbed version of Katatonia, and some parts even get close to melodic death metal territory (in a good way).

The songs on the album are highly variable, but there are plenty of highlights. In addition to the tracks I already mentioned, ‘Ritke Stadt’ features a lot of great melodic riffing, while ‘Vineta’ is a short acoustic composition that carries a sort of medieval vibe. ‘Marschbefehl’ starts out wth a furious riff that sounds closer to death/grind than black metal, but later lapses into a shout-along section which I found somewhat misguided. The rest of the album sticks more closely to a straight aggressive black metal style, but with a well-developed sense of melody.

The songs on the album are are varied enough that most metal fans should find at least a couple tracks they really like on this release. So unless you are a total black metal purist, Einsamkeit is definitely an album you should be checking out.

» Buy Einsamkeit from Amazon.com