Underground never ceases to amaze and give you something special and unique to listen and to satisfy your black heart with. CRAWL is a one man entity with one Michael A. Engle simultaneously playing drums, bass, vocals, synth and samples all at once. If CRAWL performs live that is surely unique and special sight and soundscape to behold and hear. This one contains only four songs with shortest being a little under seven minutes and longest being a little under eleven minutes. But, do not despair. Hark, CRAWL has so much to offer. This is darkness pure, so thick and when listening to this one, you feel like standing in front of a black wall with no possibility to cross it only to wither and die, but also it provides darkness so touchable that you can almost feel the wall of fear and despair with the tips of your fingers. CRAWL plays something in between blackened dungeon doom with tortured vocals screams, some whispers and speak like in horror movies, many samples, distorted bass, slow and funeral drum procession melancholy emphasized with piano and synth parts and some almost ritualistic slowing down, like you can virtually feel your heart beat slowing down and some song parts for me symbolize withering and dying, hopelessness and darkness, with no end in sight only despair and anguish, also with aggression as a result of realizing above mentioned. You must listen to this one as a whole process, it is excellent.
No Point in Living is hailing from Japan and it has been in the scene since 2015. This is very prolific entity under mastermind, one individual called Yu. This is the brand new opus and it contains seven songs. Music of No Point in Living can be described as a mixture between depressive suicidal black metal, more aggressive and raw black metal and atmospheric black metal with longer songs and so many emotions in this opus, making me remember why I love black metal so much as a means of expressing darkness, atmosphere, feelings and your innermost self and demons. Lyrically this opus delves in waters of self hate, depression, hopelessness, making it out of this alive or dead, darkness and nihilism and misanthropy. Vocals are deeper in some songs like singing from coffin or beneath the earth, gloomy and dark, so is guitar work, but there are lots of tempo changes in song parts but retaining some really melodic, at times acoustic synth backed parts to make it almost a vessel comprised of soundscape black ship which takes your mind and body to other spiritual dark dimension in which you feel painful but good at the same time. My personal favorites on this one are: ‘All or Nothing’, ‘Beautiful Tragedy’ and ‘Song of Loser’.
Deviser are Greek black metal band with roots going back to 1989. That means over three decades of metal and much respect for keeping the black flame alive all these decades. This is their new opus containing ten songs and it is their fifth full length in all, first one in last twelve years. I am always fascinated how Greek black metal scene sounded and still sounds different than their northern Europe mates, being more melodic and warmer so to say than the rest, yet still retaining the melancholy mixed with aggression not necessary delivering speed blast beats but quite the contrary through mid tempo songs, like Deviser has, choir parts, clever mixture of guitar aggression and melodies, synth backgrounds adding to the atmosphere and drama with occasional excursion into some faster parts of the black metal songwriting. This band sounds like Greek bm sound of the nineties with Rotting Christ and Necromantia immediately coming to mind, but it is not a copy or a clone, quite the contrary this aforementioned bands contemporary so it is nice to hear this music played that way so many years later. My personal favorites are ‘Absence of Heaven’, ‘Where Angels Fear to Thread’ featuring guest performance by Heljarmadr of Dark Funeral/Gra fame, also ‘When the Lights Went Out’ featuring guest performance of Efthimis Karadimas of Nightfall fame. Great melodic black metal album.
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