A new addition to Eisenwald’s roster promises a lot with its label release!
Eisenwald is a label specialized in everything black metal and its niches. With UADA they have a kind of melodious, near-pop variant of it, with Mosaic they serve a kind of folkloristic version of it and with one their latest releases, Svabhavat’s debut they seem to pay respect to the beginnings of the bleakest and darkest version of black metal. Black Mirror Reflection is black metal in the pure vein of Darkthrone or Mayhem. Even though they come from the Pacific Northwest (like their labelmates UADA), there is none of the typical elegiac elegance of many of the black metal bands from that region, think of Mizmor or Hell. The duo plays what they call Ritualistic Black Metal and truly this can be the soundtrack to the exorcism of just about anybody. They often start their songs with very short highly interesting sound ideas, but then blast them away with bloodthirsty fervor not too often found on Eisenwald’s roster, maybe Death.Void.Terror being the only similar artist. This here is a ritual but not in the meaning that only the music is important, here we do not witness shamans singing to a blood-red moon, but more two Luciferian monks screaming their lungs out in the depths of a church where they are igniting the candles. Sometimes they are able to very effectively hide their songwriting skills behind a veil of thunder, for example in “Abhicaara” where the song breaks down into an atmospheric middle but when the riffs collide again they do not lead to another hellish fire but rather to a more re-defined, slowed down ending. If the band follows the latter path a bit more – like they show on the title track at the end – then we are on to something great here, because the two definitely know how to raise hell, they only need to show that there ritual doesn’t start with blood and gore but also with igniting the candles and slowly giving it the pauses it needs for the incantations to work its magic. A very promising addition for Eisenwald.
