Annthennath - States Of Liberating Departure

A month or so ago Deathspell Omega announced a new album. This was great news to me because I was wholly convinced that the band is done. While I was anxiously waiting for the new album I spent some time revisiting their older and much less popular (or meaningful?) part of their discography. I'm referring to their pre-SMRC era of old school traditional black metal. Checking out all those splits they did and first two albums made me more interested in what the hell Shaxul was doing all of these years rather than to just revisit old DsO material. So I ended up getting a bunch of his bands and went on an adventure.

Reading his interviews and listening to bands on his label roster or bands where he played you'll quickly understand that he is old school and unchanging to the bone. He and people like him are the spirit of the underground scene. Sadly and I think inevitably they will eventually become ghosts as I feel at the moment that there will be no people to replace them.

In any case Annthennath is the best thing he has ever done in my opinion. This is what DsO would have sounded a few years down the line if Shaxul was in charge of things. Musically this albums is as traditional as it gets but it's not marred down by shit production or bad songwriting. The album is an expansive and interesting exploration of what can be done in the frame of black metal alone. There are plenty of riffs but they are not fun in a conventional way as they offer only darkness and cold. Another interesting thing about this album is that it actually has a very audible and well played bass. And by that I don't mean that you can hear it every now and then in the breakdown it's actually present at all times, complementing the guitars. This is both good and bad as it can sometimes detract from the overall sound (or maybe I'm just not used to hear bass that loud in black metal). All of this joined with Shaxul's unique vocal sound makes States Of Liberating Departure an underappreciated gem of finely played black metal.

Get it here.