All roads lead to black metal. Quite apart from the packaging, I knew this already, having reviewed this Indonesian band’s 2020 EP “Thy Infernal”.

A raw, old school sound greets us. The guitar riff is solitary and uncompromising. Slowing down briefly, the mood changes before taking us through further harsh iterations of a black metal kind. “Hellsign (Begotten Hope)” is more complex than it first appears. “Retaliation” starts with a sombre section – a nice touch – before heading off into a thrashy and menacing assault. It seems to be more about nasty atmospheres than fluidity. There’s a suggestion of epicness but it’s too grim for that. “Decimate (Mutatis Mutandis)” is similarly penetrating and weighty. It’s all warmongering of course, the march having as its goal the death of the universe. Rather than the preaching, I preferred the black n roll thrust of “The Gleaming Flames Burning Hadith”. The momentum is maintained with a shift towards heightened nastiness and intensity. These flames burn throughout where in earlier tracks Veneration had been quick to move on and deprive us of the opportunity to soak in the atmosphere.

“Katatonik Pantokrator” continues the rampant trend, and initially has the feel of a growly old Norwegian black metal piece, making me think of Old Man’s Child. “Excess of Darkness” also has a melodic persistence to drive home the grim and raw atmosphere. There’s a nice moody guitar piece towards the end. The album closes with “The Speckled Dust of Sanhedrin”, a hypnotic and abrasively dirty piece of black metal. This could have gone on for the whole 8 minutes and there would have been a clear thread, but it takes another dour and typically grim direction which seemed to be neither climactic nor evocative of despair in spite of us being told that all must end in abyssal void.

Although this is stylistically black metal of a bygone age, I wouldn’t accuse this band of clichés. There’s plenty of musical content. The problem I had was that “The Core of Revelation (Triumphant Resistance)” didn’t smack of resistance or triumph and for me only rarely rose above notch 2. Some of this album has energy and a black n roll feel, particularly in the second half, but as a collection of musical passages this didn’t always work for me, making it harder to digest than was necessary.

(6/10 Andrew Doherty)

https://fallentemple.bandcamp.com/album/the-core-of-revelation-triumphant-resistance