Tracklist
1 - Auriga 2 - The Angel's Invective 3 - Ritual 4 - Over The Lethe 5 - Pestilent Hands 6 - Emissary Of Night 7 - The Daemon 8 - Ghost Of Sorrow I cannot be mild when records like this arrive to my doorstep for review. This thing just suck. Modern black metal kids might call it black metal, but for sure this has none of the elements that made Black Metal a form of extreme evil art. First off, the recording is way too synthetic: the drums sound as if they’ve been triggered heavily and the effect that comes out is that of a plastic drum machine. The vocals are just shrieky and not evil, chilling or frightening or whatever at all, not to mention enormously flat, just a constant fuzz. The riffs are not loose like Dark Throne but more like Thrash Metal riffs with a very few intermezzos of melodic Norwegian feel (like early Satyricon, Emperor etc), and thsi especially true for the last tracks taken from their split with Sin Origin so basically this comes out sounding like a mumble jumble of elements hardly mix. The lyrics are about mythology and they’re rather well written, and the packaging too might have been good, since they used classic paintings and sculptures as a base but it seems Blackmetal.com has the bad habit of placing a horrible embossing effect even of gothic fonts (omg!). There is some sparce use of sytnths here, sometimes used to create the effect of a Gregorian shorus, but it is placed just so badly that you have the impression of an accidental overdub. There is little to save here. I’d like to use Fenriz’s words: “You call your metal Black but it’s just lame and weak”. Come on, do people really like this stuff?