***Shaidar Logoth return with their brand new third album Chapter III: The Void God, a massive three-sided 2xLP that that sees the Minnesota black metal specters completing both musically and narratively their inaugural trilogy opened in 2011 with Chapter I: The Peddler. The Peddler has become The Ritualist, and now summoned The Void God to consume the world and rebuild it in its own image. Three years in the making, The Void God sees Shaidar Logoth dwell in familiar torments as well as evolve into a new transfiguration of themselves, dominated by a more defiant and unpredictable experimentation of moods and torn by a more profound and enigmatic dualism than ever before. Throughout the four monstrous songs that comprise the forty-eight minute double LP, the band's sound shapeshifts dramatically, designing increasingly claustrophobic and erratic trajectories and leaving the listener as helpless bystander to a disfigured and mangled ritual, while the songs evolve in and out of each other in a constant duality of ominous abjection and puzzling beauty. Sonically ungraspable but stylistically grounded in the fiercest and proudest black metal tradition, on Chapter III: The Void God, Shaidar Logoth have conjured the same inverted and lurid atmospheres we've seen in bands like Leviathan, Funeral Mist, Misþyrming and Sargeist, while their unique and unmatched penchant in eviscerating beauty and grace has given birth to their most luminous and magnificent album to date. Features an etched D-side.
2XLP $27.95
11/06/2020
***Originally released in 2015 by cult tape label Sol Y Nieve on a limited run of tapes, SHAIDAR LOGOTH's towering and imposing black metal masterpiece The Ritualist went all but unnoticed and now finally sees its first ever release on vinyl through a staggering audio-visual presentation customized to fit the utter majesty and uniqueness of the music. It's wretched spires and hideous silhouette appearing instantly magnificent and awe-inducing; its monstrous aura reaching far beyond the grasp of most trivial, uninteresting, tamed, and craven black metal that so much litters the underground today. Far from being anything traceable back to any "school" or restraining set of rules within black metal, with The Ritualist, Shaidar Logoth have instead unchained an inner beast of utmost dread and freed it of any form or restraint to let its savage and primordial instinct roam free to find its inevitable fate in inexorable chaos and destruction. Within these four vast movements of sickeningly magnificent atmospherics and dismal intensity the listener will face the same demons and blood-chilling premonitions of horror and torment which have famously plagued other secretive and reticent black metal projects like Leviathan, Katharsis, Blut Aus Nord, S.V.E.S.T., Skaphe etc.
LP $16.35
08/24/2018