Black Sorcery

***Rooted in two decades of Rhode Island black metal lineage—with members hailing from past bands Bog of the Infidel, Sangus, Nefarious, and Sorcery—America's Black Sorcery emerged out of the plague days of early 2020. Fittingly for such origins, the quartet play a consciously regressive style of music that rejects the bloated aesthetics of most modern American black metal and embraces the arcane forms of the past. Whether it's the paradigmatic early days of Gorgoroth or the contemporaneous turn-of-the-millennium work of Behexen and Satanic Warmaster serving as the aesthetic foundation, Black Sorcery truly sound like they do not belong to this decade nor this country. Crude and rude but not without a sense of regal refinement, the band's Deciphering Torment Through Malediction debut album storms right out of the gate and leaves little to the imagination: this is all-caps BLACK METAL forged in the fires of old and tempered with the patience of longtime zealots. Each song of this 40-minute work combines cold, somber melodies with raw, visceral aggression in an unapologetic homage to the early waves of black metal. No matter the tempo—rippingly fast, folklorish downshift, hypnotic pulse—Black Sorcery keep proceedings orkish and medieval, such as they were back in the glorious times of Sombre, A.M.S.G., and Drakkar Productions. Form meeting content, their lyrical expression revolves around the themes of torment and mutually-assured destruction in the form of curses wrung from a severe disdain towards all human life, and butchered rituals performed in the heat of pure resentment, resulting in one's own self-destruction: the ouroboros of esoteric failure and abysmal ruin. And all these ripped-raw tones are rendered all the more powerful with mastering courtesy of Enormous Door. No more but definitely no less, Black Sorcery's Deciphering Torment Through Malediction is pure black metal for pure black metal people! Edition of 100 copies.