Black Metal History Month - Stangarigel : " Na Severe Srdca

The first band that finds me at back to basics Black Metal is from this band from Slovakia. I appreciate they are not full blast beat ahead right out of the gate. The folk elements are present, but they are not totally LARPing out and pretending to be Vikings since there are no Vikings from this region. The fugal horn might seem like a lot, but it works here. Not as dark I a normally want my black metal but willing to accept it. Things are about to get a lot darker for Slovokia since they are at Ukraine's back door. Another one of their neighbors is Romania, the home of vampires so they could tap into the darkness of their undead immigrants, yet I do not hear that happening. 

In some ways they remind me a little of Inquisition. The vocals are not quite as croaked but fill the same space. Another thing that plays into their favor is how the songs each have their own feel. This is no small feat as many black metal bands just let things drone into one another and it feels like there is just one long song blasting out your ear drums. We ger three and a half minutes into the second song before one shows up and then they do not rely on it. There are more nods to classic metal, most notedly Iron Maiden in some of the guitar melodies, and how they gallop. There is a happier more power metal like tone to the guitar of the third song that I am not as much a fan of. 

"Smaragdova" finds me back paying more attention as it had more menace juggled between some of the riffs that feel more like Blue Oyster Cult. There more deliberate chugs being the more impressive of these. They sum everything up on the last song which fuses the wide range of sounds already offered while having the feral nature of black metal at it's core. Though the mix and overall production of this album are weird enough to take the edge off what this could be if the drum had more bass and were higher in the mix it might sound heavier, but instead we got what we got here.  Sound issues aside, I enjoyed this album enough to give it an 8.5, it could have been darker, but some of that might also lie in the production, though it bears saying it proves my point of the egregore of where band comes from effecting the vibe of the sound.