Evilfeast "Invoking The Ancient" Cassette last 3 copies totally sold out!!

Limited to 100 hand-numbered copies.

While the atmospheric, keyboard-driven sort of black metal has never been my preferred niche, there are certainly bands within the idiom that compel me and Evilfeast is chief among them. Something about the old-school keyboards and triumphant, medieval riffs combined with the darkness and romanticism that always seems to permeate Polish black metal just scratches the itch in a way that other similar sounds fail to.
This, though... this one's not my favorite. It's not bad, don't get me wrong, but compared to other Evilfeast discs (Elegies of the Stellar Wind, say, or the excellent Wolves of Hyperborean Frost) it just seems a little paint-by-numbers. The badly-sampled timpani that open the title track don't exactly start things out on a high note, and the shimmery keyboards that appear and disappear throughout the rest of the song frequently seem added as an afterthought. GrimSpirit's vocals, both clean and distorted, sound great, though, and while the drumming is pretty quotidian the guitars pulse with energy and solemn, heroic poise.
It's unfortunate that this is the opening track for the EP, because B-side "The Nine Ghosts" is drastically stronger. The slower pace is a better fit for the prominent keys, and the arrangement seems more purposeful. The unmusical stop-start transition around the 3:30 mark is obnoxious (why do bands keep doing this?) but otherwise I have no trouble shutting my eyes and immersing in the atmosphere of the track.
Over these two songs' twenty combined minutes some real brilliance can be heard, but you have to get past the least-inspired aspects of the Evilfeast sound first; even the album cover, a clear homage to Godkiller's The Rebirth of the Middle Ages, implies this. Invoking the Ancient, on occasion, does what the title implies, but more often it invokes older and more famous black metal bands - and not with too terribly much success.

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