Dodgy things may or may not be happening in Belarus, but I’ve found this is a go-to country when it comes to metal music. Here’s another one in Pa Vesh En, a black metal project with the values of emptiness, discomfort and violence. This is Pa Vesh En’s third album with three eps as well.

The album duly starts with “Homicidal Sacrifice”. Eerie sounds fill the air. Desperate screams can be heard. It sounds like there’s a blood-laden ritual is going on as the clock strikes death. The obscure dingy atmosphere leak into “The Eyes Full of Horror”. There’s a sound akin to an industrial process going on. The sound expands, unpleasantly of course, and there’s more creaming and murky atmospheres. The sound is produced but it still has an old school rawness about it, brought about by the sense of distance. Yes, the eyes are full of horror. It is the music of hopelessness and despair. It is melancholic and has hypnotic beauty. There’s nothing hypnotic or beautiful about “Chamber of the Rotten Flesh”. It’s just raw and violent and nasty. Pa Vesh En seem to cover most angles with their song titles, the next one being “In the Wood of Hanged Men”, another spewing cacophony of vitriol and screaming. I’d better take a shower after all this to clean myself up. The riff is dirty and contemptuous. It explodes into violence. The sound is distorted. It all adds up to terrible scenes and discomfort. If you thought you were having a bad day, just listen to Pa Vesh En. It’s so wretched as an atmosphere that I confess it made me laugh irrationally.

“Conquerentes de Iniqua Nece Confessionem” provides another four minutes of ghastly hard labour, uplifted by an air of tense gloom and melancholy before the jollity continues with the carcinogenic clouds of “spellbound by the Witchmoon”. This witchmoon is beset by heavy, haunted sounds. The monotonous hammering ends suddenly in the way that black metal does, and transforms into the pitch-black symphonic slab that is “The Black Coffin”. To terror and threat and the sound of suffering, add depression. The moans and screams keep us on track with the relentless suffering that this album portrays. “The Black Coffin” has a bit of Blut aus Nord about it, but in general it’s black metal of a wider scope but all leading to the same unpleasant outcome. Haunting and obscure screams and a bit of monologue return with “Sister of Sin”. The riff is as ever desolate, in the ilk of Burzum and like much of early black metal, creating a decrepit, empty atmosphere but one which is prone to explosion. All that remains is a reminder of the haunting void with which we started, and a final ode to decay and decrepitude.

I listened to this on a warm day. There’s nothing warm here. It’s cold and hostile and horrible in the way that you want to be when you listen to black metal. This is an album that’s strong on suffering. I didn’t detect an ounce of positivity in “Maniac Manifest” but there’s plenty of atmosphere and that’s all fine by me.

(8/10 Andrew Doherty)

https://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com/album/pa-vesh-en-maniac-manifest