Lay down your souls to the gods Rock and roll, Black Metal! Yes, tis the season to be grim and frostbitten. Hang up your favourite Halloween decorations, don your corpse-paint and march forth into battle! I’m such a seasonal Black Metal fan that it’s almost a joke, I like the genre a lot but it literally exudes coldness to me. I’m not going to have my car windows down with my shades on in the summer blaring out Mayhem, it just doesn’t work.
A place that is rather sunny though and has a strong Black Metal scene would be Greece. One such band stick out from the crowd too, the essential Necromantia. Their 1993 debut Crossing The Fiery Path is a tour de force, as is their 1995 second record Scarlet Evil Witching Black (which is a fantastic name for a release). They’ve remained active since their 1989 inception and have slowly pumped out the odd release here and there, although to little effect it has to be said. So, it’s time for their landmark fifth full length, To The Depths We Descend… put out through The Circle Music, does it reach new lows or go on to plunder the heavens?
Daemonocentric opens the hell gates as we plunge into Black Thrash style riffs laced with an almost Melodic NWOBHM tone. A great guitar sound backed up by atypical albeit entertaining Black Metal rasps with little range. A bit Inquisition sounding in all fairness (perhaps not a band you want to be likened to but there we go). Next track And The Shadows Wept goes into a longer song format, slightly unnecessary but I can see what the band are trying to do here. It has that kind of lame ‘epic’ build up to it, with little in the ways of technicality or flare. I do enjoy the chunkier riffs however, it’s got good groove to it, although much like the opener it isn’t overtly memorable, the ending is pretty cool at least. Then it gets worse with a totally pointless instrumental in Give The Devil His Due, this and the title track are so filler it actually hurts.
Eldritch makes the keyboards really come alive, although it’s still pretty tried and tested in the realms of Symphonic Black Metal, good song but very generic in all influences. Then we get into some truly lazy rehashing material with Lord Of The Abyss MMXXI and The Warlock MMXXI. Both tracks are pulled from the classic Crossing The Fiery Path debut, it’s the sort of nod that probably sounds like a good idea to the band and terrible to everyone else. We don’t need re-recordings, especially when they amount to over twenty minutes of the albums length!
In truth I don’t hate the sound of this album, I like Necromantia and particularly their first two records. However, this release feels bare, the songwriting isn’t anything outside of the box, then on top of that there are two instrumentals and two re-recordings. That’s basically over half the album wasted, I expected so much more from these Greek Black Metal icons and I’m honestly left very disappointed, don’t bother with this, go back to the early records and support the band from there. My score reflects a point for each new actual track, so there we go.
(4/10 George Caley)
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