There are bands out there who care not one iota about modernizing black metal and expanding its universe through experimentation and progressive tendencies. Bands who stand proud with their cloven hoofs solidly planted in the orthodox soil of especially the second wave of Norse black metal bands such as Darkthrone, Emperor, and Mayhem. Bands who adhere to an established formula, a tried-and-true idiom, a musical expression released in various guises several times down through the years.
Beastcraft is definitely one such band, and they’re proud of it, too. They’re not the best and absolutely not the worst of this orthodox ilk. They’re old-school and conventional enough not to seem artistically pretentious and scare the old guard away, yet they manage to add just a dash of uniqueness and dark violence so that you’d never accuse them of being a clone band. These guys actually have the words “True Norwegian Black Metal” printed on the back of the CD cover – I shit you not! These guys appear very fucking vehemently opposed to making any concessions that would in any way weaken their black metal credibility; on the inside of the cover it says, “True Black Metal must remain total underground!”, but they get away with it because this, quite simply, is a good album by a good band.
This old-school “trve” underground sensibility is most certainly reflected in the music on this album. Tremolo-picked guitars, drums that hammer away, often blasting, sometimes slowing down for dark atmospheric passages, a bass that really can’t be heard, and snarling, rasping, evil, hateful vocals. The production is rather dense and muddy, purposefully I’d think, in order to fit better with the overall underground image. This makes the individual instruments somewhat hard to hear – the drums especially sometimes disappear behind the barbed-wire screeching wall of distorted guitar riffs, but it’s not, I feel, a problem. The guitar sound really adds to the general aura of uncleanliness and satanic filth and is probably the aspect that more than anything else sets Beastcraft apart from their black metal peers. This does occasionally sound like a dirtier version of Darkthrone circa 1994 with a pinch of Gorgoroth, without being quite as good as either of those.
The lyrics, about satanic supremacy and eternal darkness and goats and black altars and foul ceremonies in the night, may seem to originate from somewhere beyond the valley of cheesiness, but they’re delivered with such force and conviction that it’s actually quite alright. And it takes some kind of confidence to come up with song titles, in 2007, like “Blackwinged Messiah of Blasphemy” and “Enthronement of the Third Antichrist” and “The Grand Conjuration of Unhallowed Spirits”.
If you’re in the mood for some truly orthodox, dyed-in-the-wool, fuck-invention-and-progress black metal filth with no keyboards and next to no originality, you could do much worse than picking up this dark offering by Beastcraft (gotta love that name, by the way, it’s really powerful). Some of the tracks are even kinda catchy in their own foggy, corpse-smelling way and there’s the barest hint of an attempt at epic majesty in the closing track, “The Beast Awakens”. A bit more variety and fewer tempo changes would have done this album good, but then again . . .
Sample:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7w4ZweGb2Q
