Hate Forest - Innermost (2022)

•  †  •

The Unquenchable merchants of aural fury and barbarism ride into the end of the year with a late release of their trademark black metal and its sheer immensity picks up right where 'Hour of the Centaur' left off. Buoyed by the tumult of this year, and no doubt the years prior, intensity and animosity is a palpable force on 'Innermost' as torrents of icy riffs wage war with the galloping bombast of Hate Forests' typical unrelenting blast-beats and of course Romans gruff vocal belt, which atypical for the genre, lends bulk and threat behind its framework.

It's because of releases late in the year like this, that I try to hold off on cementing any type of year end list. The more spins I rack on Innermost, the more it creeps into my list… The riffs are compelling and impactful, and few out there match the primitive velocity Hate Forest conjure. The riff a minute into "Temple Of the Great Eternal Night" is a Bolt Thrower level war anthem!

As of the day of this posting, 'Innermost' is set to be released by Osmose Productions tomorrow, so I don't have a bandcamp link directly to the album, but me and everyone else without an early-listening link have been listening to it through this YouTube link the label provided.

Bestia Arcana - Holókauston (2017)

•  †  •

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.

•  Ω  •

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)