Black Funeral - Az-i-Dahak
2004 / Black Metal
I have had this on/off relation to Black Funeral for
multiple years where I keep coming back to them but the urge to listen their
stuff fades away relatively quickly. In general I have considered their music
worth listening to but somehow I often forget about them until something
reminds me of their existence again. However, recently I decided to check them
out more thoroughly and for that purpose I just acquired a copy of Az-i-Dahak, and
so here are my first thoughts on it.
So Black Funeral has a long history in making vampirism themed
black metal/dark ambient and Az-i-Dahak is listed as the midpoint of the band’s
discography. On the first spin I take note that that the sound is not as raw as
on some of the band’s other albums and apparently the ambient elements are not as
strongly present either. (Or then I remember it all wrong because I haven’t
listened to their stuff in ages, but anyway..) So what are we actually left
with?
To summarize, Az-i-Dahak is a thirty minutes long set of shorter monotonic
black metal tracks. Now to be honest, I have thing for this kind of black metal
if it’s done correctly, and in my mind this album manages it really well.
The
album goes for a semi-raw soundscape so the sound is rather unpolished, gritty
and partly kind of flat, but that’s all part of the magic of this album for me
at least. The atmosphere is kept consistent and it is aggressive as well as
cold. I think that not a single bad track managed to make its way into the album
and there is just enough variation between them to make the whole thing a short
but engaging experience. At the time of finishing this text I have already went
through the whole thing like four times so I guess it’s safe for me to say that
I like it. I think that anyone interested in raw or monotonic black metal could
find this worth a spin or two.
No comments:
Post a Comment