Catacomba- The Wolven Temple: By the end of the introduction/first song I find myself wielding my shield and axe and preparing my corpse paint and chain mail tunic for Thousand Swords era-style woodland photo shooting. Epic and old Gravelandish as it gets as this could easily be a long lost Graveland rehearsal of forgotten songs or something and no one would probably notice. A worship band, but a damn good one. As I expected (and as a band like this should be), the riffs are folky, aggressive, and have that Thousand Swords atmosphere and the first song is one of the most convincingly triumphant yet aggressive approaches to the Temple of the Fullmoon style I've ever come across, I love it. Screams sound like a young Darken and keyboard introductions/interludes nail the early 90's TTF sound. More please.
Reptile Womb- Thee Fyrste Deathe: Serpent Wrything Beneathe Thee Græve: Extremely entrancing, pulsating, heavy drum machine beats with downtuned and rumbling bass complimented with noise and sampling elements. 3rd song samples Alien and then just begins hammering you into the ground, but everything is a frantic blur in this album. This is truly heavy and dense sounding, you can practically smell the incense and rotting meat. A complete dirge of hypnotic, bloody death trance. Every time I listen to this album is blows by, every song sounds very similar in a lot of ways with one of the only main variances being the tempo but somehow it feels cohesive, like a psychedelic pattern that changes colliding in shifts and fluctations while holding a somewhat similar consistency in how it is perceived. Recently read that he was torturing himself during the recording of the vocals in the true Abruptum/It fashion and you can tell. First song after the intro opens with it sounding like he is being killed. I played this while working with someone and they described it as 'trippy as shit'. I wouldn't disagree, other then I'd add insane, rabid, and trippy as shit. I liked Below but this is truly and literally another beast.
Ahpdegma- Seolfkwyllen: Symphonic but ugly and 'off', described as 'necro-symphonic black metal', normally such labels make me roll my eyes or immediately lose interest but this actually pretty aptly describes the music here. Yes, the vocals are similar to Dani Filth at times, there are keyboards, there are melodic and maybe even catchy parts, but this isn't what it seems. The vocals first of all are very shrieky but then there are baritone croaks, spoken word parts that aren't exactly spoken, other times he almost sounds like a less accent heavy but more out of control Attila. The guitars have that LLN style out of tune sound that makes it sound very weird, keyboards are primarily piano parts but not played in an eloquent Sigh like way, instead these also sound out of tune and off kilter. Riffing has a very diseased, sickly, and warbly style that is executed frantically. Lots of jerky shifts and weird disharmonic parts. All of this is a recipe for failure for most but it's so weird that I've been obsessed with this album for periods. I really like this to the point I almost burnt myself out on it a few weeks ago.
