Black Metal History Month - Funeral Chant : "s/t"

Not generally a fan of raw black metal, but in all fairness I am reviewing one such album during Black Metal History month and this is it. Glad I picked this one because for what it is these guys are pretty decent. This Oakland black metal band nailed the raw ambiance part and they have some pretty mean feral riffing kicking you in the ears on their self titled album. It opens really strong with the highly Darkthrone influenced "Spiral into Madness" which is way more cohesive than the song that follows, which is reckless barrage of blast beats, with riffs that sound more death metal. "Flood of Damnation" doesn't find them recapturing the level of song writing the showed us on the opener and opts for a thrasher sound that has more in common with altars of madness.

They throw even more caution to the wind come out with blustery banging over garbage can blast blast beat that is recorded in a manner that hits you like a jagged storm of riffs until they go into more of a gallop. A guitar solo goes down amid all of this and they even wind up on a darker more melodic progression, so if old Bathory is more of your thing then you will dig this song, I am not quite as impressed with it , but oh well. The more punk aspects of black metal are in play on "Morbid Ways", which might bring to mind a dirty version of Venom. It has more of a thrashing snarl to it. You can make out what it going on in this song better than the first. Diving whammy bar propelled solos give a wink to Slayer here and there before the song converges into a more locked it chug.

This album is book-ended by two songs that show this band can write song, but they often choose to take a sloppier path.If this sort of thing is what you are into then you are likely more of a punk who likes to dabble in metal than an actual metal head so all of my issues with this album are going to be the things you love about it. My friends over at Cvlt Nation are going to be right there with you.With all of that said I am rounding this down to an 8 which is a pretty high score for a sub-genre of black metal that I normally do not care for , so that means they are doing something right.