Everything points to a desolate and devastating black metal experience: a grey/black sleeve, a face-painted and anguished-looking individual called Nahash who provides all the instrumental and vocal input, images of suffering. The lyrics are equally devastating: “I feel the coldness of the extinction gulping down the earth”, we’re told on “Beware of Darkness”.
Funereal tones and swirling carcinogenic clouds greet us to start, then rasping vocals, razor-like guitars and blasting drums bring us the cold atmosphere of “The Sun is Dead”. This is template old-school black metal, as previously advertised by Burzum, Darkthrone et al. Although I heard nothing original in this, the music evolves well and captures the bleak mood that is evidently the point of this work. The sounds of isolation give way to an explosive and ferocious mood as we embark upon “Of Fire and Dust”. It has a magnificently melancholic passage in it but unfortunately it plays itself out and ends the track. This would have been the ideal mood with which to fill our heads before crushing us still further, but unfortunately it doesn’t happen. What does happen is a crackly piece of emptiness called “The Abyssal Void”. It’s as if time was limited in the recording studio. I’m not sure what the hurry is, because surely the idea of this kind of atmospheric black metal is to create the image and build on it. “The Last Eclipse” is another ferocious and bleak affair, but again runs out without exploiting its maximum impact. All that remains is “Beware of Darkness”. It is cold, but in fact left me cold as it burns its way misanthropically and nastily through its message. It’s like a song but delivered in a whole-heartedly black metal way. I did not find it striking or exceptional in any way.
Although there’s nothing remotely innovative about this 19 minute ep, it can be argued that it conforms to the values of black metal and meets its apocalyptic theme. That said, I felt that “The Last Eclipse” doesn’t go beyond its remit, and failed to inspire me into sharing the total human devastation which I guess I was supposed to share.
(4/10 Andrew Doherty)
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