***The Sky Burial, the ancient Himalayan ritual burial dating back to centuries of the Tibetan Buddhism tradition of taking the bodies of the deceased amongst the highest peaks to be dismembered and consumed at sacred burial grounds by vultures and other scavenging animals, and then dissolved by the high altitude elements, or as the tradition states, to be returned to the sky. What may seem a brutal or savage practice to western eyes in reality is a revered and elitarian burial in ancient Himalayan culture, and this concept borrowed by Portuguese black metal nekromancers Concilium for their immense third offering "Sky Bvrial" has laid the foundations for an absolute beast of an album and for one of the most otherworldly and death-scarred extreme metal releases of the year. Truly immense in its scope and vision, just like the death ritual it recounts and evokes, "Sky Bvrial" channels the omnipotence and darkness of death through a majestic lens of transcendence, ritualism and contemplative reverence toward the power of nature and of the immortality of ancient lore. The nauseating stench of death emanates from every knit and fabric of this beastly record, as the black flame of highly atmospehric sepulchral black metal bands like Demoncy, Teitanblood, and Beherit is re-ignited to conjure visions of a churning, monstrous vortex of rotting dismembered flesh levitating towards heaven, and taken skyward to be returned to the afterlife by massive carnivorous scavenging birds. A truly unparalleled and moving listening experience conjured through seven primeval slabs of...
CD $13.75
06/23/2023
LP $21.95
06/23/2023
***Portuguese atmospheric raw black/death metal necromancers Concilium issue their tenebrous debut LP "Desecration," a churning spectral emanation of total and agonizing death exhaling at the edge of a decaying void. Like the bastard child of Portal, Beherit, and Black Cilice, "Desecration" levitates from pure darkness with a miasma of tortured lamentations, serpentine whispers and suffocated screams radiating from the innermost depths of torment, while an incessant outflow of sepulchral lo-fi raw black/death metal murk reverberates through the abandoned pits of buried temples and lost sepulchers materializing a truly unsettling and ominous aural nightmare. The band's masterful texturing of decaying and sulphureous black/death metal with subterranean aphotic atmospheres and a diseased sense of occult ritualism creates a lightless aural twilight that embraces the listener like a disembodied disease, giving away way to a blood-freezing (and at times even moving) out of body experience.
LP $17.75
07/02/2021