Otep Rises like a Hydra

Praise Otep Shamaya

Otep Shamaya wrote this. First woman lead singer in heavy metal to come out.

Livestock

It began
With a pen
In my hand
Stabbed
In the center of chaos
To write out the light
That lives within me
That sought to break
The darkness
Eating me alive…

For hours I would sit
Dreaming, drawing
Writing, believing

My arm in a sling
One eye swollen shut…

Whispering
There would be a way out
There must be
A way out…

Focused
On the paper
On the floor
That held me
Heavy as a stone
In the corner
Of that tiny room
Floating on a river
Of Imagination…

Isolated
On my knees
Seeded in the soil
With girls
Younger than I
Holding their backs
Arching puffed bellies
Stuffed full with their
Infected children…

Celestial incest…
Terrestrial insects…

We slept in boxes
That doubled as coffins
Because
Some were smart enough
To die…

But not I
Stubborn little cyclops…

I
Was destined 
To fight……

Bloody Lightning

How something can be both so frenziedly vicious and epically rich is almost beyond understanding. Keep of Kalessin’s Armada appeals equally to the bitter old bastard and the fresh-eyed boy in me. I suppose the overlap is found in the speed of this metal — it is like a huge and bloody bolt of lightning. And yet on each track the compositional deftness shines through, as does the production quality. It’s Satan’s raging hardon in a filigreed copper sheath.

This album, in short, is a triumph on many levels. If you like your black metal to be both mean and musical, you’re going to listen to Armada often.

Romanian Metal Masterpiece

10 years before, these guys made an album called Maiastru Sfetnic.  Then, in 2010, they remade it and called it Maiestritt.  This may be the greatest album that Romanian black metallers Negura Bunget have ever made.  Layered, searingly beautiful, majestic. Not a note wasted; just brilliant.

The almost classical compositions, the heartfelt roaring (I almost don’t want to call it screaming because it never seems pathetic, if you know what I mean), the creative instrumentation and refined power of this album make me return to it time and again. Maiestritt is masterful. 

Black Perfection

I’ve heard Deathspell Omega before, and wasn’t as impressed as perhaps I should have been.  But Paracletus is a different story.  This is a furious work of art.  A perfect combination of teeth-grinding apocalypse and sad musicality. This is what makes black metal so different, to my ears, to other metal subgenres.  There is honest creativity here.  Not technical virtuosity, not pompousness, not “I can thrash faster than you”, but creativity.  I like where they take me.

Riding To War Under A Black Silk Pennant

You know, if you listen to Darkestrah there is little evidence that their lead singer is female.  Admittedly, this is easier with black metal than with death metal, as the growling in the black variety is higher-pitched anyway: like the growl of a small panther rather than the roar of the Lion King.  But there it is. She calls herself Kriegtalith, and in full black-metal regalia she’s almost indistinguishable from her male counterparts:

But I digress.  Darkestrah hail from Kyrgyzstan, and they’ve been around for over a decade. I haven’t heard all their music, but there is a trend towards greater quality through the years.  Their latest album, The Great Silk Road, is quite possibly their best.  I love their pagan black sound.  It is rich and evocative without being cliched, and, like all black metal, it is also comfortingly forlorn. (You can worry about the contradiction if you want; I just enjoy it.)

Urfaust want you to repent in leisure

Imagine travelling in a jet-black, filigreed gondola down the River Styx. Everything is dark, except for a faint oily sheen on the water and the ultraviolet inner-mouth glare of your gondolier, as he scream-sings to you with aching soulfulness of the fate awaiting you in Hades.

Urfaust are something new. There is such an extreme blending of heartfelt beauty and horror in their work that I find it impossible to stop listening to them.  The album in question is Der Freiwillige Bettler (as you probably know, one needs to be very specific about which album to rave about when it comes to metal bands), and no black-metal album in recent memory comes close to the density and detail of atmosphere that this 2010 album evokes.

Their metal has been described as pagan, black and doom – I think these adjectives all apply to Der Frewillige Bettler – that is, if you can describe echoey wailing as “pagan”.  (Don’t get me wrong, they do the echoey wailing superbly : – )

The singing sounds as if a squad of Prussian foot soldiers had been banished to Hell, and it is now 300 years later and they are still gnashing their teeth in agony and screaming penitently for all the raping and pillaging they had done while alive.  Sorry, I know it sounds like I’m having fun at their expense; but black metal is nothing if not melodramatic.  But as with all good art, everything is larger than life in black metal (or is that larger than death?), so you must expect this kind of … plumminess.  With worms in, of course.

Seriously, though, these guys are incredibly good.  They are not only aesthetically powerful (self-effacingly overwhelming, is another way to put it), but also sincere.  I dare you not to be carried away by their heart-searing music.