Curated by Arnold Blum
We’re going dark this February. Your Triple Shot Review for today is a lineup of three black metal bands from the high north; Estonia, Russia and Sweden. They’re dark, they’re cold, and they might inspire a hunger for the bloody leg of a Satanic goat. Check ‘em out.
From Tallinn, Estonia comes VIMM with the video Carcass Of Mother Earth, officially posted to YouTube this past December. As the title states, it’s a song about the destruction of the planet. Straightforward with lyrics like “We hold our hands at her throat, We watch as she dies”, they’re not worrying themselves over poetry.
A thrashier mix of black metal, it hits fast enough to bang your head in a trance to. Lovely scenery of burned out and an over-logged earth, too. The only drawback is that they don’t seem to be pushing the boundaries you’d expect of the genre.
Vspolokh released a music video about six months ago called Shigyr. The Russian group refers to themselves as “Ural Chthonic Black Metal”. There is a mountainous region called Ural in Russia, and a legend to go along with it of a man named Ural who sacrificed himself for his people, and was buried under a pile of large stones which eventually became the Ural mountains. Chthonic is a word relating to the underworld. So if you wanted to then, you could describe them as “a black metal band from the Ural mountains of Hell. They are quite creatively dressed in this video, which is identical to the way they present on stage at their live performances. The music is definitely dark. Take a listen to Shigyr:
The newest music video from Marduk, Shovel Beats Sceptre off the album Memento Mori, released last year. The imagery is nicely blackened old-school. Håkansson founded the band in 1990 with the intention of being “the most blasphemous band in the world”. This song, however, does not have any religious undertones. Instead, they want you to feel your impending mortality. Be sure to take in the lyrics as you watch this one from Century Media Records:
