Ungod

By making deranged counterpoint music which expresses the auto-ostracization and directionless existence of black metal, Ungod have won a place on the shelves and in the hearts of many metalheads as the "rainy day album."

Circle of the Seven Infernal Pacts Merciless 1994

Production: Roaring smoke from an oxidizing basement demo studio. Review: In the stream of powerchords style of atmospheric rudimentary black metal Ungod weave a fine melodic sense through continuity of raw rhythm power in riffing and extension of phrase through variation and structural points of change toward theme, development and conclusions. With the complexity of a basic hardcore album and mostly standard chord shapes, this appeals to few except the perverse Beherit extremists but offers an insight into chaos caught in structure and projected linearly. Tracklist: 1. Silence in the golden halls of endless hope (3:47) 2. Circle of the seven infernal pacts (4:06) 3. Land of the frozen tears (1:51) 4. Magieus tulis damnatio (2:37) 5. Dark winds around the throne of blood (2:56) 6. Lost beast, born in darkness (3:59) 7. A journey through forgotten myth (2:23) 8. The grotesque vision of a dying moon (3:24) 9. Black clouds beyond the fullmoon (4:50) Length: 29:56 Copyright © 1994 Merciless Conceptually the album centers around mood rather than expressed ideals and in that forum of atmosphere ventures through darkness and an epic sense of conflict and essential difference in battle over constricting space as time evolves themes toward resonance and recombination. Changing tempo for dynamic motion this band vary constant racing drive with junctures and switches in song structure that change with dynamic mood and shape of melody, reflecting vast inversion or change in counterpoint to earlier structure. Dark and morbid in theme it is nonetheless energetic and with an enlightened sense of riff construction mated to forward thought on melodic continuity, for the most part this album creates black metal of great power, with some songs on here hitting the mark less than others. Constant undulation of tone and pronounced, definite change in narrative make this memorable in experience while an almost ear-friendly sense of melody underscores construction. A harsh shriek of constant tempo offbeat emphasis paces these works of often blasting black metal. Forgotten for its simple rawness and direct appeal in a time of popular advancement of aesthetic in black metal, this album and its progenitors shall again be hailed when black metal returns from its detours toward the basics of its heuristic of composition, and although perhaps never seen as foundational understood as aspects of foundation to a genre growing within itself toward its own purity.

Conquering What Once Was Ours Shiver 1995

Production: Loud, clear, boldly spaced. Review: Racing nihilistic black metal with a clearer presence of melody than the first album possessed assembles the simple structures of this EP with an emphasis on the core of metal in simple evolutionary cyclic song constructions and epic riffs wrought from dynamic change in melodic shape over rhythm emphasizing conclusive patterning in which driving resolution to tone dominates resonant harmonic factors in phrasing. Tracklist: 1. I am the chaos (4:33) 2. Firestorm, ashes ... genocide (2:23) 3. Conquering what once was ours (4:35) 4. Vita reducta (4:49) 5. Anatomy of Human Destructivity (4:42) Length: 21:04 Copyright © 1995 Shiver Savagely minimal but competent in instrumentalism and feral in howling vocals, the package as a whole bears the aesthetic of alienated black metal from the primal and rudimentary school, but within this displays an epic sense of compositional dynamic and riff placement in a narrative development of conceptual symbolism in thematic pairing. Carrying the blasting melodic black metal concepts of Zyklon-B and Impaled Nazarene further, Ungod on this EP integrate their new sound from classic metal, visionary nihilistic minimalism and raw doomish rhythmic tugging insistence into a hybrid of minimalist yet vast transaction of events in song.

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