Reditus Culto Janus is a demo that uses black metal imagery to stage a full-blown pagan counterapocalypse. The band, from our far distant capital Ravenna, chooses Janus as its symbolic figure: god of beginnings, thresholds, past and future, substituting Christ as the regulator of time and fate. Where Christian eschatology has the end of the world opening an eternal era in the light of God, here the “end of the false Christ” becomes the zero point from which a new cycle restarts: dark, consecrated to Nature, plague, and ancient cults.
The tracklist maps a clear path from eternal damnation and plague (Eternal Damnation, Peste Morbosa) to ritual and lunar sacrifice (Sacrificio alla Luna), through to the emergence of the universal Serpent (Serpent of All) and the tearing down of Christ (The End of the False Christ). The conceptual core sits in The Ancient Cult of Desecrated Cathedral and in the title/closing pair Reditus Culto Janus / Culto Janus: the cathedral, symbol of Christian triumph, is imagined as a violated shell beneath which the older cult resurfaces: that of Roman deities and Nature. Janus, the two-faced god of doorways, becomes the ideal patron deity for a city like Ravenna, historically positioned between the Roman Empire, the Gothic Kingdom, and Byzantine rule: a frontier/liminal city where the idea of an era in transition is practically written into the stones.
Curious enough Ravenna holds the oldest anthropomorphic representation of Satan as the angel of death that judges the flocks of God.
Within this framework, the “return to the cult of Janus” closes the Christian parenthesis, reopens the gates of time, and returns the world to pre-Christian and anti-modern forces. The band’s stated philosophy predictably the usual pain-in-the-ass of Nature-worship over impure mankind, hatred for society and religion, etc. etc. pretty much baseline in modern Black Metal, and finds in the references to Janus, the moon, the serpent, and plague a coherent form: ruin as the beginning of a new pagan cycle born from the rubble, lit by the fire of nocturnal rites.
This cassette is the result of a recent small Australian micro-release, originally on Wig Records, limited to 30 copies. While musically I liked it more than I expected (the sound is full and massive, and the furious black metal sonics work) there are still the same two things that end up wobbling the thing a bit.
The vocals function overall, but the high notes hold for absolutely nothing, like the singer is choking on a hard candy; when he stays in the midrange, though, the blend works quite well.
The second thing that doesn’t do much for me is more intrinsic to the band’s concept itself: this whole impulse to frame blasphemy as a pagan return, which we haven’t been able to shake since Blood Fire Death, may well have spawned an entire new branch of the genre, but I genuinely find it boring and not just “mannered”, as I wrote in my last post.
The record is about cyclical return, the closing of a Christian era and the reopening of an archaic cult meant to outlast the ruins; the chosen god literally manages time and beginnings, and the label is called Eternal as if the reactivated cult weren’t just an aesthetic revival but something that claims to exist outside of time, more stable and “true” than the Christian parenthesis.
Look, I guess it depends, really, if the band’s goal was just to make noise drinking mead in the woods, I can let it slide, but these neopagan gestures make my eyes droop a little.
Good execution, fundamentally negligible content-wise.
