Limited to 200 copies in black vinyl
After putting out a pair of album-length demos in 2011 (the year of the project's founding), the ever-prolific Gratzug, a one-man black metal project from Bavaria, released this debut full-length album in 2012. A steady stream of releases has followed, with a new album every year and a handful of auxiliary releases as well, but let's take a look at what the productive Mephistopheles decided was enough of a statement to count as the band's debut album.
The main approach on Mondtore is a high-speed, blastbeat-backed tremolo riffing, which nonetheless utilizes fairly slow-moving melodies to reach for a lot of the same lofty heights of prideful, triumphant yet sorrow-soaked heights as their Finnish compatriots in Virvatulet, which whom Gratzug would share a split the following year. Sometimes these melodies are broken down into mid-paced breaks that will get your head nodding while continuing to yank at your heartstrings with the same melodic goodness. However, unlike Virvatulet, who revel in those sorts of sweet yet just shy of cloying melodies nearly 100% of the time, Gratzug inject a bit more graveyard darkness into the music, sometimes coming through as darker, more chromatic and unsettling vibes woven between the fists-raised-to-defy-heaven bits to remind you that death is ever-present. Sometimes still, that darkness takes over for stretches at a time, like the first half of "Mit Finstrem Blick...", in which only tiny stabs of light poke through the near impenetrable blackness. They do, though, but only just, but eventually things do get a bit more pretty in the second half.
The effect here is that the more uplifting melodies become the standard feel of the album, but the constant reminders of death and decay that come via those more unsettling riffs keep the whole thing from spiraling off into the night sky. This is all bolstered by the very "live in a room" recording, surpassing expectations laid out by being a solo project rather than the work of a full band. I suspect that Mephistopheles recorded this by first playing the guitar parts over a programmed drum beat, then replacing the programmed percussion that he played over a recording of the guitars. Though the bulk of the drum performance is made up by blasting interspersed with simple rock beats, it has a very jammy feel to it, very much the sound of a drummer spicing up the flow of the often repetitive riff cycles by adding a lot of passionate and lovingly sloppy fills and accents to the beats. The vocals are also very well executed: a high, frosty shriek that hurtles above the mix. I do kind of wish Mephistopheles had opted to separate his two guitar tracks a bit more in stereo. There's really just sort of one "main" guitar track that carries the melodies while another much quieter one is there mostly for just texture. I'm not even actually 100% convinced this second guitar track even exists - it could very well be an artifact of reverb or simple room echo or something of the sort.
Mondtore in particular and Gratzug in general are a shining example of the trademark Finnish melodic sensibility finding itself influencing the black metal explorations of non-Suomi bands who recognize and embrace its particular charms. Borrowing a particularly potent example of how emotion-packed those melodies can be, Gratzug swirl this influence together with their darker, more brooding German style to create something new and captivating. It's wonderful to hear how the end result is both predictable yet unmistakably a product of the artist who made it. Compare, for example, the nearly equally Finnish black metal inspired German band Shores of Ladon to Gratzug, and the immediate differences resulting from similar influences will be quite obvious.
While it's not quite as immediate a listen as, say, Virvatulet, the riffs and melodies on Mondtore are very rewarding when you take the time to see how expertly Mephistopheles has woven together both the light and the darkness to imbue his melodies with a certain dynamic quality that always keeps you waiting for those more pure expressions of triumph and sorrow to burn away the dread blackness, scouring away obscurity to leave the untainted surface of raw emotion fully exposed. Highly recommended for fans of Finnish black metal who haven't searched for practitioners living beyond that country's borders, or generally to fans of raw but riffy and melody-driven black metal in the finest of second wave traditions.
Sample:
youtube.com/watch?v=EArPXdmgpxo&list=RDEArPXdmgpxo&start_radio=1
