Blazemth
Review: This EP of atmospheric death metal manages to incorporate all of the clichés of the genres that compose its aesthetic and yet to successfully use those well-honed icons to achieve a unique atmosphere without requiring musical complexity. It opens with a tragic sappy keyboard piece that leads into a military march, composed for some ludicrous opera of religious cadence that plays itself over the stomp beats.
Copyright © 1995 Abstract Emotion
This gives way to strobing melodic riffs under chanting in the style of any atmospheric band with melody, simple phrases leading into harmony before interruption by structural aberrations. Fast tremelo strumming and single-note speed picking comprise most of these riffs, offset by longer segments of fast relaxed strumming of slowly changing power chords establishing melody. As this tonal mass saturates the listener with context and relative change, its internal balance rises to meet its internal dissonance, resulting in a mixture of tonal endpoints creating a mood of lingering harmonic conclusion. The patterned interactions resulting stretch melody through the structure which must introduce it, bringing from logical inquiry an inspired vision and impassioned response.
All of the major scene-pieces of black metal play out in these cycling songs, which alternate between strut beats and pulsating speed beats, giving a broad exposure to a canon of black metal pattern terminology without knowing how specialized the vocabulary makes the speaker. In this the surging arrangements of convergent directions fused into linearity make coherent the broad style and influences of this band, allowing its own voice to emerge and complement black metal with an imaginative and sensual detour away from the known.