So to our Portuguese cosmic black metal band. This is actually their debut album despite a nineties formation date, an EP ‘Evil’ and then time interrupted by a long layoff due to internal self-destruction. All goodv inspiration it seems, proven by being picked up by Code666 to boot. Which means at the very least we expect competence and class and from the first few seconds that much is plainly there.
Angrenost have a dark, glistening, modern sound neatly plucked out by the production. There are keyboards aplenty here, swirling the sounds of a particularly unforgiving, cavernous cosmos in a very Event Horizon way: Hollow, echoing passages with harsh metal clanking and babbling, preaching voices, passages of calm and obsessive, hissing vocals dripping poison and insanity in your ear. At its heart though is a driving, orthodox black metal sound but one mutated by these cloaking devices. Bits of early Limbonic Art chained and dragged into a modern sound close to some of the French circle. Rasped and snarled vocals placed well in the mix to allow them command of the sound when needed, blasting drums pushing the wall of guitar noise. Orthodox.
However the way the keyboard and samples infect the sound is what brings texture and colour to Planet Muscaria. I do think it’s fair to say that you may find a bit of the Deathspell Omega and Blut Aus Nord approach herein, but it isn’t a suffocating presence. More a stepping off point as Angrenost produce music that is less experimental or avant-garde than those two but is definitely idiosyncratic in an intriguing and compelling way. Noise rises on drum and guitar to peaks, disembodied voices chime in, the music drops away and we plummet deeper into the abyssal rift of the album to be snagged by the weird, nattering and gnawing soundscapes until their damage is done and again we plunge. Despite being separated into eleven parts, this is very much an album to be taken as a whole, a piece with plunging movements and the clattering wrongness of the samples and the plateaus of the more straightforward blasts. At times wonderfully, malevolently chaotic and nihilistic, at others just a surging flow. If the more traditional blasting sometimes dulls the ears, there is no cause for concern as this system will soon fling dark matter at you, knocking you off balance and regaining the interest and edge of fear.
Sometimes you don’t know if you are falling or being sucked down into the maw at the bottom of this dimensional horror, but the direction of travel is as unmistakable as it is inescapable. It is really quite a surprise of an album as despite my reservations at the more ‘normal’ aspects, Planet Muscaria is bristling with as many malignant, black spikes as any glance into a Cenobite’s hell cold hope to bring.
Dark, nasty, off kilter and at times downright weird. Got to be worth any black metal fan looking into this abyss. And it might indeed look back.
(7.5/10 Gizmo)
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