Lum "L'Feu e la Stria" CD Digipack (Bonutrack)

"L'Feu e la Stria" is the debut EP from Italian black metal duo, Lum. Composed of S (Ghost Gardener) and Khrura (Feralia), Lum create darkly romantic, ghostly melodic black metal, themed around Italian witchcraft and sorcery.

LUM are a brand new black metal project out of Turin. Their debut EP ‘L’Feu e la Stria’ offers a striking mix of atmospheric and raw black metal. It’s as if Ildjarn, instead of working with the melodic riffsmith that was Nidhogg, had instead taken up arms with the frigid barbarism of Veles. The resulting alchemy blends the unadulterated abrasion of nature’s wrath as seen from the perspective of a reflective and melancholy soul. Distant, mournful keyboards worthy of early Skepticism work alongside guitars that reach above their earthy punk roots, as if aspiring to match the simple yet resonant melodic lines that thread through these tracks like daggers to wistful hearts trapped in the unbearable tedium of modernity. The guitar tone itself is immediate and intimate; operating somewhere between the half clean sound found on Graveland’s ‘Following the Voice of Blood’ and Ildjarn’s ‘Forest Poetry’. The fact that individual strings are audible opens up new avenues of expression for LUM. We see them veer from black metal’s punk roots into almost jaunty folk refrains built from accessible but highly effective chord progressions. The distinctive twang of the strings found within each strum adds extra layers of harmonic material that would be hidden from view on a fully distorted iteration of black metal guitar tones. And speaking of distortion, a heavy bass rumble is discernible beneath the fog, for example on the breakdown of ‘Canto alla Luna’, where the guitars settle on ringing chords, leaving the bass to carry the stop/start rhythm along with throbbing, driving notes.
That being said, this is still a lo-fi, raw black metal mix, and the guitars fit well into the alienating, abrasive aesthetic of the whole EP. Drums offer a solid underpinning of simple mid-paced blast-beats that serve as an impetus of momentum in the more exhilarating moments of this EP. The intrusive clatter of snare and cymbal serves as an effective contrast to the dreamy, obscured keyboard tones that colour the majority of these tracks with wintry tones and open spaces, tempering the dirty soil of distortion and harsh static with some welcome mysticism. Vocals sit between these competing impulses. The high-end passionate screech is not unlike early Ungod, in that it serves the dual purpose of heightening the aggression and intensity of the music whilst opening out the size and emotional impact of its more ethereal qualities. These tracks are constructed from the simplest of ideas, but each element is worked through every possible variation along the way. The guitars may offer a basic but oddly unpredictable (and therefore engaging) chord progression, with the distorted bass layering up the sound, granting it longevity. Excitable drums and passionate vocals then take up the mantle; all is extremity, flexing black metal’s capacity for utter misanthropy, as if it does not want to be listened at all. LUM trade on the virtues of trancelike repetition to build on this vibe, carving out music from fragments of ideas, suggestions, and colours as opposed to any intricate architecture. The result is no less immersive. But this infrastructure inevitably gives way to the dreamlike keyboards, which fill out the sound as if in antithesis to the amoral harshness of the metal instrumentation. They provide a point of tranquillity, one that opens and closes the EP, bookending ‘L’Feu e la Stria’ with a sense of pathos, and at least granting the listener a final catharsis despite the Ildjarnesque raw minimalism that runs through LUM’s approach. A fascinating EP of equal parts raw and atmospheric black metal that shows an intimate knowledge of where this style’s appeal lies and exactly how to build elegantly simple but infinitely engaging compositions from these rawest of materials.

Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...