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Discs of Auspicious Vision

Tag: Black metal

  • Blind Buy Archives #1: Daemonium – Dark Opera of the Ancient War Spirit (or Search the Light) (1994)

    David

    Time for another series of posts I will start and inevitably abandon. I’m dubbing this series Blind Buy Archives where I will post short, light, fluffy reviews of music I purchased as a blind buy– purchasing without hearing the music, that is. I am fortunate enough to be able to dig through all manner of record stores and thrift shops in my free time and can spend a few bucks here and there on used CDs & records that tickle my fancy on the strength of their cover art, title, or some other inscrutable facet that speaks to me on a smooth-brained yet spiritual level.

    The joy of a blind buy is in the gamble (gambling is bad, don’t do it, kids) of finding something obscure and kvlt that has been hidden away that you otherwise would never stumble upon. There is also the adventure of finding something not great and digging in to it, really digging in to it because god damn it you spent 6 bucks on this CD and you’re going to get your money’s worth. Sometimes that is the best way to develop a relationship with an album that you could easily have written off if you passed by it on a streaming service. It’s a low stakes version of how it used to be where you’d buy a CD or record from the store and that was it. You didn’t have much money and you couldn’t easily look it up online first so you just have to sit with whatever you purchased and find the good in it through repeat listens.

    I’m microdosing 2003 is what I’m saying.

    Anyways, let’s begin with our first entry into the Blind Buy Archives:

    Daemonium – Dark Opera of the Ancient War Spirit (or Search the Light)

    Purchased At: The Beat Goes On, Kitchener, ON.

    Price: Maybe 10 bucks Canadian? Used copy.

    The Hook: What a title. What a title. Absolute black metal theatre kid energy (complimentary).

    First Impressions: Endearing kinda-symphonic-kinda-Hellenic black metal who’s huge ambition more than makes up for it’s mediocre execution.

    What a joy to find. The entire package here had me giddy as I left the BGO to head home. The long and winding title, every song being titled an Act of the story, being on fucking Adipocere Records, the instructions in the liner notes to “put yourself in an obscure universe and put the volume to maximum!”. Pure cinema.

    I looked the album up when I got home and behold: a one man project from 1994 with a single 25% review on Metal Archives. Also curiously, with releases in 1994, 1995, and 2016, Daemonium has released this album and this album only 3 times in a row. First as this release on Adipocere, then as a split with Moonspell‘s(!) incredible EP Under the Moonspell, of which this entire album makes up the B side, and finally as a three way split with Akhenaton and Sangdragon. Again, the Daemonium portion of the split just being this album, in it’s entirely, again, over 20 years after it’s initial release. Hell yeah, brother.

    Out of curiosity I checked out Akhenaton and Sangdragon since I didn’t recognize the names. As soon as I google them I do, however, recognize their logos. Feel free to perform your own analysis below by pulling the white bar left and right. Feel free to scroll back up to see Daemonium‘s logo for reference as well.

    Both logos pulled from Metal Archives.

    Now, I want to be crystal clear: I think this rocks, actually.

    Our man Lord A. V. Daemonium has a vision and has been honing it and refining it over the decades across multiple projects. I listened to the full length albums of his post-Daemonium bands and I can totally see the through line and evolution of his music, going from the chaotic and amateurish 1994 symphonic black metal to the much more professional and realized Hierophant released by Sangdragon in 2023. As much as I generally dislike how everything is logged forever on the internet, it’s honestly inspiring to see this long time musician try and try again, shift and follow muses, and keep making the music he wants to make time and time again. There’s an air of “no, I know this is good, I just need to tweak it and revise it” permeating this artist’s history that I think any creative among us can relate to.

    Let’s stay in 1994 for now and chat Dark Opera of the Ancient War Spirit (or Search the Light).

    Up front I want to mention that this came out the same year as Emperor‘s In the Nightside Eclipse. Like, symphonic black metal wasn’t a thing yet and Daemonium were already going hard into the genre. Dark Opera opens with “Act I – Necromancy”, a dark and looming atmospheric, synth filled intro track which builds for two minutes into “Act II – Chaos’s Resurection” [sic]… another atmospheric intro track running almost 3 minutes. What guts to have to put two intro tracks on your debut. The funny thing is the pacing is actually great, with tension building and building and building as synths pound, rising in pitch and tempo and chanting dances over top. Eventually the music explodes into the Hellenic black metal inspired “Act III – By The Sword in the Blood”, complete with melodic riffing and more orchestral synth stabs worthy of a grimace and a fist pump.

    Performances are a bit sloppy and the orchestral sounds feel so dated and low budget that it non-ironically brings a huge smile to my face. I’m sure resources were limited when making this album, and Lord A. V. Daemonium cared not of the limitations, only that he can bring his epic, operatic story to life. Same comes with “Act III” ( or “Act IV”, the CD is one long unbroken track so I’m trying my best to decipher which acts are which movements in the music) where a sword fight erupts… with the aural intensity of a drawer of cutlery tumbling down a gentle, grassy slope. It sucks, but it rocks, and I love it regardless.

    When all is said and done, there are really only two actual black metal songs on this release with one really nice acoustic piece nestled in there. About 10 minutes of Dark Opera‘s 26 minute run time is black metal. The rest is atmosphere and set dressing– intros, outros, and interludes of varying intensities carrying the undeniable vibe of this thing from start to finish.

    A quick aside, the acoustic passage in the album evokes memories of the Divine Beast Cave music in the 2000 action JRPG Dark Cloud which is a nice nugget of info for me and me alone, but it rocks and is another thing that just endears me to Daemonium and Dark Opera as a whole.

    And in a word, endearing is what I can say about this CD. Front to back: the title, the music, the packaging, the song titles, the production choices (and limitations), and the lore surrounding it really sums up what I love about independent metal music.

    The power of the human creative spirit is indomitable, and heavy metal is forever.

    All this leads us to the only question that matters:

    Is it Sick?

    Yes, if you are not a coward.

    The Context Zone™️

    In addition to the album reviewed above, I also listened to the following music to try and get a bit more context for this release and/ or to cultivate the right headspace:

    • Akhenaton – Divine Symphonies (1995)
    • Sangdragon – Requiem for Apocalypse (2015)
    • Sangdragon – Hierophant (2023)

  • Teitanblood – From the Visceral Abyss (2025) | Album Review

    David

    I hate Metal Promo™️ lingo, and I will do my utmost best not to succumb to describing how any particular album’s “whirring chainsaw guitars will eviscerate you” or “necromantic wails from beyond the grave howl out in pain” or whatever. If you catch me indulging in any ergregious act of Metal-Promo-lingo-izing, feel free to take me out back and fucking shoot me.

    In Metal Promo™️ lingo, particularly relentlessly heavy bands are often called “crushing” or “suffocating”. Hell, even the blurb on Teitanblood‘s own Bandcamp page says their 2025 release From the Visceral Abyss “forges a suffocating atmosphere”.

    I don’t think that’s the case.

    No, I’m not being a contratian. No, I’m not engagement bating. Let me explain.

    “Crushing” and “suffocating” are localized affairs. You are crushed. While one can be crushed by something gigantic, the only scale of the relevant action here is as big as the victim. Same with suffocation. They’re both claustrophobic. Personal.

    Teitanblood instead offer something grander and uncaringly huge in scope on From the Visceral Abyss. Slicing winds strip your flesh as you look out over an ash covered wasteland, ruins of imperceptible age piercing the hostile terrain, stretching out into infinity.

    Wait, don’t shoot just yet.

    In a word, From the Visceral Abyss is big. While the band is as liberal with its use of blast beats and dissonant, atonal guitar playing as ever, there’s a sense of air between the instruments that I haven’t noticed in previous releases from the band. While the LP from France’s Norma Evangelium Diaboli spins on my turntable, the guitars sound distant, as if their cabinets are roaring several feet behind my main speakers. Drums ring out with plenty of reverb, while cascading across the stereo field (panned from drummer’s perspective, as god intended). Bubbling under all of this are the vocals, equally as distant and cold as well as additional layers of guitar– atonal solos and divebombs adding even more abrasive texture to the whole presentation.

    The solos are buried in the mix across the whole album, which is honestly a welcome change from black/ death metal bands’ typical piercing, in-your-face placement. I revisited their 2014 masterpiece simply titled Death and the difference in scale was staggering. A decade ago, they were serving up vicious music no doubt, but it was a frenzied melee– they offered the listener no space to find respite from the music. No longer is Teitanblood a snarling beast mauling you through speaker cones, but an unflinching portal to a far less personal yet equally deadly realm. Unflinching. Cold. Almost Lovecraftian in it’s lack of empathy for you. They show confidence in their creative choices, their intuition well honed after over 20 years in the game.

    Very briefly, stints of melody poke their head through the dizzying cacophony. These are welcome respites, offering something, anything for your mind to hold on to and make sense of. Sometimes they take the form of tremolo picked melodies lower on the fretboard, othertimes as jangly, arpeggiated chords ringing out. From the Visceral Abyss is definitely an album that needs multiple listens to fully reveal it’s secrets to those willing to receive them. Not to say it isn’t enjoyable on first spin, but if your first impression is anything more nuanced and coherent than “that was… damn”, I’d think you were lying.

    While Side A absolutely rips, Side B is where things start to shift, keeping you on your toes. “Strangling Visions” barely swerves in and out of ’80s thrash and speed metal territory, never fully giving in to the genre switch up but flirting with a leather-clad chord progression(?!) under a particularly fist-pumping solo. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t Teitanblood going soft, this is the LaCroix of heavy metal influence. Somebody left the From the Visceral Abyss masters lying next to a 1987 Gibson Explorer overnight.

    The near-fifteen-minute closer “Tomb Corpse Haruspex” opens with ominous chords reminding me so much of the lumbering intro to Mick Gordon‘s theme for “Nekravol: Part 1” from DOOM Eternal‘s untouchable soundtrack I nearly let muscle memory take over to ready an SSG-Balista quickswitch combo on some imagined controller. Not today, cybermancubus. The rest of the song, following suit with the first two-thirds of the album picks up energy– blasting, swirling, occasionally allowing a melody to surface, and just generally ripping– complete with a couple Conqueror style pick scrapes just for good measure. Trumpets blare in apocalyptic glory as the track reaches its conclusion, becoming swallowed up in impenetrable reverb, feedback, howling winds, an unintelligible monologue, and finally one last piercing bray.

    I suppose despite my best intentions, even I cannot shake the curse of using Metal Lingo™️. It’s in my blood, well entrenched in my past. I’ll fetch the super shotgun.

    From the Visceral Abyss is available everywhere and can be purchased on Bandcamp.

  • Resthaven – Lunarwave (2025) | Album Review

    David

    I’m a relative newcomer to the Ontario metal underground. I’ve been a fan of metal for closing on two decades, but not until World Eaters began playing live did I really start engaging with the scene around me. Musician faux-pas, I know. But beyond that, it was also fucking stupid of me, because Ontario has some absolutely killer bands dropping albums left and right.

    Toronto’s Resthaven have released their second full length, Lunarwave in February of this year, following their 2023 self-titled debut.

    Hissing guitar feedback gives way to gang vocals punctuating twin guitar leads stripped straight from any given blue-castle-on-the-cover black metal album from the mid 90s. The sword-swinging leads are contrasted by thrashing turnarounds and barking vocals, solidifying the swirling mix of influences that make up the foundation of Resthaven‘s newest effort.

    But just marrying black metal and thrash isn’t particularly exciting by itself. This is where Resthaven‘s strength lies– in slowly letting Lunarwave open up as it goes on, inviting the listener to bask in the kaleidescopic array of other genres that float around that black/ thrash core.

    There’s a playfulness in the songwriting on Lunarwave that is tough to explain. The album is heavy, definitely, and a serious offering– it isn’t doing a bit nor is it tongue in cheek in the way it shifts gears across it’s 33 minute run time. It is, however, undoubtable that the members of Resthaven are in fact, real ones and built their music (at least partially) out of love for their favourite artists and albums. The riffs on this album aren’t made by people who think At the Gates starts and ends at Slaughter of the Soul. When you ask a member of Resthaven for a Swedish death metal album recommendation, they pull Uncanny‘s Splenium for Nyktophobia off of the shelf. Resthaven are studied fans and are clearly stoked to be making music in the style(s) that they love.

    The title track brings in some of Dan Swanö’s signature goth rock sensibility both in the melodramatic (complimentary) intro as well as during the bridge to build up to a phenomenal catharsis once the snaking chorus reprises. “Left in the Gutter” swings far into the post-hardcore leanings you’d find in countless anime openings, layering chanting over more vulnerable vocal wails and extended chords bouncing along with aplomb. It’s frankly a little jarring on first listen hearing this J-rock inspired tune after the previous song’s pummelling pace, but it pretty quickly clicks in place as both being cohesive with the underlying vibe of the album while also providing a much needed break from the HM-2 riffing, which only gets more claustrophobic and hardcore inspired as the record continues.

    A band after my own heart, Resthaven features local musicians (and presumably their friends) on a couple tracks, with Blood Wraith dropping gut-rippling gutterals on “SUSOV” and Consuming Misery following suit on “Punished” as the song drops to an Asphyx-like crawl. Both features bring another dimension to Lunarwave‘s already multifaceted approach. We love homies helping homies.

    My only gripe with Lunarwave would be the guitar production. It runs amok with wily HM-2 tones, and while the riffing channels Dismember, Crowbar, and Nails in equal measures (Nails especially on the spin-kick worthy outro of “Nibelheim”), it doesn’t seem to have the muscle behind the tone that I want to hear.

    It isn’t anything that actually drags the album down, but a wistful “what if” that just drapes across my mind. As far as I can discern, the band mixed, and mastered Lunarwave entirely on their own and that in itself is a triumph. It’d also be remiss of me not to say as a fellow HM-2 owner that, yeah, dialing in a tone on that shitbox is hard as fuck. The amount of times I’ve clicked mine on mid-set thinking I was about to get gnarly just to have my guitar playing swallowed up by a wall of scooped, fizzy noise is more than I care to admit. Resthaven, thankfully avoids such an amateur move in their production. The choice to keep the bass rumbling along with a powerful, warm and clean tone keeps every instrument in their own lane and stops things from getting too messy.

    Some folks wax about how easy musicians have it these days with home studios and the ability to record completely DIY, but let me tell you from first hand experience that doing it DIY is fucking hard and anything coming out sounding as good as this album sounds overall should be celebrated.

    So, if I’m not gonna be a weenie about the production, where does that leave me on Lunarwave? It rocks. It gets a “hell yeah” from me. This is a blend of black metal, thrash, death metal, and hardcore that is so refreshing to hear. It deftly dodges the hardcore/ death metal trend that erupted from labels like the 2022 Maggot Stomp roster by just pulling from references a bit off the beaten path. Edge of Sanity rather than Suffocation. Black Breath rather than Terror. In doing so the band isn’t whipping up copy-cat riffs, but instead flexing their ability to dissect what makes those artists great and weave something unique and engaging out of those inspirations.

    Which brings us to the only question that matters:

    Is it sick?

    Yes.

    You can listen to Lunarwave on all major streaming platforms and on Resthaven‘s bandcamp.