Cultus Sanguine

Production: Underwater basement collage of tapes from seemingly different sessions or worlds, but clear and works with the ambient nature of this guitar-based material.

Review: A collusion between doom metal and the more melodic black metal elements in the genre, Cultus Sanguine works wonders with some often extremely cheesy and emotionally forced music that in its essence is not that different from anything else, yet manages to eke its own niche for the voice it finds within depression.

Drawn-out passages of melodic arpeggiated structures against slowly strummed chords work through the relapse effect of their recursion, a returning cycle which alternates between the definitive and the indefinite. Over that a voice moans and chants melancholia derived seemingly from a depression with life which seems inauthentic given the potential these musicians have found in seemingly granular material.

Drums click along mechanically, and these long songs vary their structures just enough to avoid utter repetition, with each work representing minor progress through its vacillation between two dominant elements. Despite the failings of its mechanations however Cultus Sanguine remains relevant for the embedded voices of complexity hiding behind otherwise standard, often rock-based black metal with an addiction to Gehenna and Bethlehem.