Artist: Ash Magick
Title: Rituals Of Anathematic East
Type: Album
Label: Apocalyptic Witchcraft
No I have no idea how I’m going to do this so I’ll just kinda charge headfirst into it. I took a chance on this release as it sounded intriguing: Turkish in origin, black metal. Two women VII-th and VI-th. Now I’ve heard a bit of black metal from Turkey over the years and whilst not everything has gelled with me, there has always been an intensity to it that I always associate with seriously going against the grain of the society around you. Add in the label, Apocalyptic Witchcraft, whom I have an immense amount of respect for, and I thought I figured it was in the absence of any serious digital preview source, worth a punt up front.
What we get?
The intro is a weird, subterranean sounding swirl and judder of guitar and deep chanting vocals oddly distorted and wailing and choral sounds, gargles and choking. Disorientating from the outset, deeply enveloping. And into ‘The Kneeling Wretch’. This is just a wall of blazing black metal guitar,pretty lo-fi sound with the percussion pushed way down. The deep moan of keyboards in there, the strangled, howling vocals just about keeping their head above the waves of violent black metal. If raw, discordant black metal is not your style then the exit is over… oh wait. There is no exit. Odd tempo changes, moments of relative quiet that still dig in claws and its clear we are in a strange and dark place indeed. ‘Beyond Dara’s Gates’ pretty much bursts out of the chaos as a straight, raging torrent of riff and noise. The intensity here is insane, the violent and virulent stream of anger the music pushes is superb. When the pace slows it descends into almost Teitanblood territory.
‘Sacred Flames Of Anathema’ drills down hard, the vocals often barked, the sound monomaniacal,locked in to the utter racket war metal style. There is definitely for me that feel of some death and war metal here; if Portal had been a marginally sane black metal band or Cobalt had gone gone full tilt into the black noise the sound and twists might have ended up a little like this. But underneath the sheer vilent noise there is something that keeps me utterly gripped. It’s as though I can feel something clawing and twisting to get out.
I assume the next musical interlude (first track side two) is ‘Babtistery’ after all. It goes from strange, noises and vocals into a surging but skeletal riff without a break. There is a definite shift to the music here; violent and chaotic but the sound is less dense and the tempos shifts in the riff and the rhythm tug me inexorably to Khanate if this sypoe of music was their style. This is where the album not only surprises me by digs deeper claws in. You can hear the you get a rhythm that chugs and lurches into an eerie keyboard backed delirium and ends in a fade. ‘Interlude’ is an instrumental which again highlights the musicality of the duo; something approaching a dark melody drives this deeper into this eerie and occasionally ethereal domain.
I think ‘Silent Ruin, None Evade’. The intensity is dialled back up, a tumultuous swirl of raw black metal, tinged with death and mixed with that deranged sense of shifting time and dextrous noise. ‘Day Of Resurrection’ closes with tolling bells and a fantastic black metal riff teetering on the edge of some abyss. It feels like claws and feet scrambling over the lip to tear at the living as the raw throated vocals preach. By this point I think we’re on ‘Outro’ but I no longer trust my sense of reality; A melange of gutterla vocals, noise and malevolnce to send me on my way back to the surface.
As an introduction to the band, though their third full length in three years, Rituals Of Anathematic East is like sticking your head into a blasting wind tunnel and the delirium that comes with it. Intense, imaginative, strange and totally uncompromising Ash Magick have have woven something truly dark, and truly excellent.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 