Bestia Arcana - Holókauston (2017)

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Holókauston is an album I have been chewing through since it came out; Slowly wading through its musical fat and gristle, letting the innocuous flavours and the potent decadent flourishes rest on my pallet before swallowing. You would be remiss (and wrong) to chalk this album up as black/death metal and just walk away as if this simple categorical summation is adequate. It's not.

It's a raging torrent of death metal at its foundation. A deluge of war-like drums poke and pound nefariously while the whirr of guitars waft around a cavernous atmosphere in a dizzying haze, gaining in traction, increasing in heft, bubbling, frothing, foaming over, spilling over its iron cusp and pouring out onto the earth. Its core tethered to the lilt of black metal, cold and unrelenting. It sounds like communicating beasts, invoking spells and inciting incantations; summoning tremors, hale, lighting, fire and the 17 plagues of babel. Your hope and whimsy left in desiccated heaps of dust and your wellbeing not so well. Malign in your bones and total ennui in your veins.

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The paragraph above is seemingly hyperbolic and self-masturbatory. A lot of words, with little meaning… Yeah maybe, but one thing is certain, Bestia Arcana released one of the better metal albums last year and it went way under everyones radar. Everyone fucked up.

One of the best albums released in 2017, period.

Bestia Arcana - Holókauston (bandcamp)