Black Metal History Month - Olhava : "Sacrafice"

It must be an interesting time to live in Russia. Out of that, this album was born. There is beauty and blitzkrieg found in the bombastic approach to black metal being dropped from the skies here. The atmosphere is thick and it hits you with a hypnotic drone. The vocals are a layer of screaming that just adds a touch of human scorn to things. Their strengths lie in the spacious blankets of atmosphere they wrap you in. The black metal elements crash in behind these always lurking. The second song seems to have just washed you over with the ambiance, it is hard to tell if it was a song at all. 

They continued to hypnotize you with the melodic theme dominating this album on the 17-minute "I See Myself in Your Eyes". It is a wall of sound that loses you in the sonic swathe. Some of this could have been edited down and still had the same effect with a more concise nine-minute song. On top of bringing you wild wandering excursions into the unknown ambiance, they also write pieces called "Ageless River: which is broken up into parts spaced throughout the album which are just atmospheric interludes allowed to sprawl out. At over fourteen minutes" Eternal Fire" is another song that might have benefitted to have some of the excess atmosphere trimmed back to give the song more direction. As it is things move like clouds, awaiting the wind to guide them. It all sounds great. 

This album is well produced, they have everything dialed in to create an opiate of sonics, but from a song perspective it is something you feel more than listen to. The title track is an even more straightforward static drone of sound that works off the vibration of blast beats. When the screaming comes in it is just another layer, The lyrics could be in Russian and it would not matter as they are never something that stands out in the songs. Midway in the drums go half time, which takes the tension away and releases things to soar in a predictable fashion. I will give this album an 8, I like the sounds captured sometimes they work better as a song than other points, but they succeded in what they set out to do here which is hard to argue against. 

pst49