Resuscitator

Simple but avant garde doomy black metal from Los Angeles.

Resuscitator - Iniciation (1996)
Resuscitator - Cursed Visions from his Infernal Realms (2001)

Wild Rags

1996

Production: Evil third-world garage style production enhances musical value by abrading background to mimesis of guitar, creating a morbid effect of decay.

Review: Masters of entropy Resuscitator emanate evil from this release of primitive but avant-garde experimental black metal. Using harmonics to guide riff composition, Resuscitator move from the evident and boring tendencies of simplistic black metal to more bizarre and often extraneous but sometimes, apocalyptic and lucid, structures.

These tonal ideas are not central to any unification themes or concepts, so they float atop random and atonal passages of simple twisted-wire-ends riffs and jarring dissonant bridges; they function to enhance the essential quality of this band, which is doom and the encompassing feeling of moribund anti-futurism.

Tracklist:

1. Father of Obscurity
2. Inciation
3. Black Funeral
4. Servants of the Darkest Throne
5. Grant Us the Passage
6. Legions from the Past

resuscitator iniciation a black metal album on wild rags label

Vocals chant in hoarse thick throated diatribe, following naggingly simplistic riffs down a pumping base of rock proportion drumming. Choruses in the older Greek black metal style, with melody riding resistant rhythms to a confirmation conclusion, come to great effect here between verses of ranting tom drums against alpha-synchronizing strum patterns.

The naievete of these riffs may irritate the listener after some time, but credit goes to the band: each song is immediately distinguishable from the others and even though patched together in places they seem an honest effort with potential for power in its style but simple beauty in its communicative evocation of morbid darkness.

Resuscitator - Cursed Visions from his Infernal Realms

1. Into The Abyss
2. Inherit The Wisdom Of Darkness
3. Battles In Blood
4. Madicion
5. Cursed Visions From His Infernal Realm
6. Hells Storms
7. End Of My Mortal Life
Length: 28:08

Cursed Visions from his Infernal Realms (Quadrivium, 2001)
Between this band's first and second album, black metal all but fell apart in its own hands. Recognizing this change, the second release from Resuscitator embraces the mixture of aesthetics in metal, merging Slayer-style death with rough black metal vocal and hints of melody and keyboard harmony from the latter genre. What it produces is something with the cyclic, vaguely carnival air of Satyricon's "Nemesis Divina" with a more relaxed approach to musicianship in a homegrown style of Dodheimsgard "Monumental Possession," producing an album that loops through some enticing riffs and sounds and achieves an aesthetic foundation independent of the genre in order to showcase its riffs and licks. There is not much in the way of concept or engineering of style here, but what remains is a profoundly good metal album. It will shatter no barriers with its innovation, or novelty, nor will it ever be one of the first things sought next to the stereo, but as an encouragement to the continuation of metal this is a stalwart and likable document.