Finland’s Convocation are not exactly new to me, nor are they an artist that I have invested a lot of time with either. I recall trying them once and quickly finding myself distracted and off elsewhere on my to do list soon enough. Not that they necessarily did anything wrong, I usually find that aside from mood as an obvious influence over my enjoyment of a record, some music simply must be listened to from a critical perspective. No Dawn for Caliginous Night Is not background music and nor does it impose itself on the listener intentionally. Simply put, it is so well written, performed and arranged that to attempt to listen to it casually is very near to being an insult to Convocation.

I am a fan of both funeral and death/doom and to date, I do not recall that I have encountered an album that successfully combines the two sub-genres so eloquently. It is rare for the chug of the guitar that we get treated to around the six-minute and forty-second mark of album opener, ‘Graveless yet Dead’ to be present amongst such desolate sadness. Likewise, the poignancy of the melancholy of instrumental track ‘Between Aether and Land’ is uncharted territory across such a blended style of extreme metal.

 If I recall correctly, one of the guys involved in Convocation was (maybe still is) in Desolate Shrine, and I get snippets of their sound throughout this record. The definitively gloomy sound of Finnish funeral and death/doom permeates the record as you would expect. Finland has a proud heritage already in this field and No Dawn for Caliginous Night carries on that fine lineage. With such a well-produced album it is great to hear the rumble of the low end with just as much clarity as the slow-picked guitar notes, with even the harsh vocals receiving a great airing. Listen closely to ‘Lepers and Derelicts’ and appreciate the busy nature of the track as the guitars appear to chime a tune within the track. I have already lost track of how many times I have listened to this album now. Each time I do, I discover or notice something new. As if I needed any excuse to keep coming back, constant discovery is an added boon.

Steineiche is the 1998 debut album / demo (delete as necessary) by a young Wintherr (Tobias Möckl) and his fledgeling Paysage d'Hiver black metal project. In its most widely available version it consists of three lengthy tracks, each quite distinct, and has a runtime around an hour. The original, limited edition, CD-R version had a fourth track, Déjà Vu, which doesn't appear on subsequent versions and which I haven't heard.

Even at this early stage it was evident that Wintherr had an uncanny knack of wringing an enormous amount of atmosphere from the most basic of palettes. The length of the tracks inevitably leads to a degree of repetitiveness, but Wintherr's genius is in never allowing such to become monotonous or boring, but continuously evolving each track so that listener engagement is maintained, whilst not straying too far from the original premise and enveloping and immersing said listener in the atmospherics. The production values are exceedingly lo-fi as anyone familiar with the project would already guess, yet Wintherr works this in the music's favour, using sparse, lo-fi recording techniques to infuse his work with an inherent iciness that feels sharp and brittle like winter frost and is eminently suited to the atmosphere of this album in particular and the wider concept of "The Wanderer" that makes up the entire discography of the project, thus laying out his manifesto very early on.

As I mentioned at the outset, the three tracks are each very distinct, yet they complement each other inordinately well. The opener "Die Baumfrau" ("The Tree Woman"), begins with an ambient intro complete with that staple of Pd'H releases, samples of a winter wind blowing frostily from the speakers, before erupting in a shivering blast of black metal iciness that is probably nearest to what most would expect from the project, but which is no less effective for that, it essentially being the acorn from which that particular black metal oak germinated. The riffing and blasting is of a pummelling intensity and the high-pitched shrieks are searingly harsh and sound like someone taking a power sander to an orc's balls, but the track feels even more sinister when these give way to a deep, spoken-word section where the vocals hover around on the edge of audibility before the frantic shrieking reasserts control. Subtle little details like this, along with the insertion of a gothick-y guitar melody over the main riff in the middle section and another near the track's end that sounds like bluegrass banjo-picking, prevent the track from becoming stale whilst still maintaining the direction of travel, a skill with which Wintherr has proven to be admirably proficient over the years. By track's end, such is the impressiveness of his nascent songwriting ability, you don't even realise that twenty minutes have elapsed.

For the second epic, very different, track we get to hear from The Tree Woman's spouse "Der Baummann" (The Tree Man). This is a much more moody-sounding piece that has a doomier ethic with a guitar sounding at times very similar to Celtic Frost, or more accurately Triptykon. Overlaid with thin keys and a picked guitar melody and featuring guttural croaking vocals mixed quite low, this has a sinister, ominous edge to it, contrasting superbly with the savagery of the opener, as if the threat of "Der Baummann" is deeper and more profound than the mere physical violence of "Die Baumfrau". Ending with a tortured (possibly synthesised) violin scraping at your mind, the track seems to threaten the annihilation of soul as well as body.

The closer is a twenty-five minute ambient piece with a haunting, ritualistic atmosphere. Now I am not known for my patience with long ambient tracks. My dislike of "Rundgang um die transzendentale Säule der Singularität" on Burzum's "Filosofem" seemingly flying in the face of popular opinion, for example, but Wintherr here shows Varg how to construct a lengthy epic with quite simple building blocks that never threatens to become tedious. From ritualistic and almost martial-sounding beginnings it reaches for the stars and becomes more cosmic and occult. With barely audible spoken vocals that feel like the probings of a Cthulhian titan seeking to escape its cosmic prison, it hints at secrets of the universe that a mere man's mind could not possibly comprehend, nor soul withstand. Ending with a female operatic aria, "Der Baum" leaves a quite stunning impression.

I must confess that, for some inexplicable reason, I had never checked out this debut until now, but now I have I would probably list it as one of Paysage d'Hiver's most interesting releases. The songwriting is extraordinarily accomplished and as he was responsible for everything on the record, Wintherr's technical competence cannot be sniffed at either. Whilst I accept that some may struggle with the sparse production, I find that the lack of high production values removes a layer of artifice from between artist and listener and allows an unvarnished reopresentation of Wintherr's intent to be heard, to everyone's benefit.

This is one of my favourite albums, not just because it is a brilliant slab of atmospheric black metal, but also because it shows that black metal needn't necessarily be hateful and misanthropic all the time, but can actually be used to relate human stories and illuminate it's listeners about topics of which they know little or nothing. Austin Lunn is also an artist who flies in the face of genre stereotypes. This is a guy who actually cares about people - he used to be a social worker but quit, I believe, due to the frustration of working within an overly bureaucratic system. So when someone tells you all black metal bands are nazi satanists then point them in Panopticon's direction.

I was originally turned on to Panopticon via his 2014 album Roads to the North and was so impressed I dived right into his back catalogue. The preceding albums were not as impressive as Roads... that is until I got to Kentucky, which is the album where the Panopticon sound really began to gel. The introduction of bluegrass music into a black metal environment was a revelation to me. I was more than familiar with the inclusion of european-derived folk elements in black metal and even middle-eastern influences via bands like Melechesh, but this was a whole new take (to me anyway) and as such sounded fresh and exhilharating. I have always quite liked the sound of bluegrass, it has a kind of melancholy to it that is difficult to pinpoint, but that resonates with me somehow (although coming from England's northern midlands I have no endemic cultural attachment to the music) but it wasn't until I heard it welded to atmospheric black metal that it actually began to make sense to me and none more so than on Kentucky's telling of the struggles of early twentieth century American coal miners against their profit-driven bosses. I don't want to get into the politics of the record, but as I worked with many family members of miners who were part of the bitter early 1980's miner's strike here in the UK, let's just say that I have some sympathy for the album's protagonists and the history of labour struggles does hold some interest for me.

Of course what we came here for is the black metal and Kentucky contains three of my all-time favourite black metal tracks in Bodies Under the Falls, Black Soot and Red Blood and Killing the Giants As They Sleep, these tracks owing much to another of my GOAT albums, WitTR's Two Hunters, an album I've waxed lyrical about on more than one occasion! This blend of poetic black metal, folk protest songs and effortless storytelling makes for a unique listening experience that defies the norm in metal music and firmly plants Kentucky on my list of great black metal albums.

I fucking love early Autopsy and so too did Desecrator, apparently. Hailing from Nottingham, Desecrator was formed in 1989 by brothers Mike and Steve Ford (bass / vocals and guitars respectively) alongside drummer Lee Hawke. After listening to "Subconscious Release" I have no idea, but I am guessing they formed after hearing Autopsy's debut "Severed Survival", released in Spring of '89, deciding that was what they wanted to play. Now, obviiously, this isn't as good as any of the Californian's early releases, but it is a decent stab at reproducing their style in a British context. Bear in mind that at this time the big UK death metal bands came at the genre from a grindcore background, Napalm Death, Carcass and even Bolt Thrower played a blasting, high tempo version of death metal, so Desecrator, looking towards the hulking, often slower-paced, abyssal-sounding death metal of Reifert and Co. were swimming against the tide somewhat. Even more atypically, the album boasts several quite long tracks with four exceeding seven minutes in length, the band unafraid to drop into a slower, doomier tempo to add variation and atmosphere during the longer track lengths. They don't completely turn their back on the prevailing winds though, with the quick-fire medley of "Insult to Intelligence" and "Deadline" on side 2 clocking in under two minutes they give a nod to the deathgrind brigade.

To be honest the album is front-loaded with the title track kicking things off and being, by quite some way, the best track on the album - think "In the Grip of Winter" or "Gasping for Air" level good. Second track "Nothing Changes Anything" is also pretty great with a hot opening riff and a gothicky, atmospheric mid-track break, but the rest of the album struggles to live up to the promise of these two opening salvos. Don't misunderstand, the rest is fine for what it is, but a faint tinge of disappointment is inevitable after such a promising start. I am no musician myself, but I get the feeling that the band are a little limited technically, as illustrated by the generally lacklustre guitar solos and the d-beat drumming not always cutting it, leaving the listener yearning for a good old blastbeat to shake things up and hit the gas pedal. Whilst I acknowledge that the band had technical limitations, these probably don't bother me as much as they do some metalheads, I am quite partial to a slab of loose-sounding deathly carnage and when the band are in full flow I am happy as a pig in shit. However, the uninspiring solos and the odd clunky transition do pull me out of the moment, fourth track "Repressive Acceptance" for example has a couple of instances where the leadwork is quite poor and ruins a good headbang as the main riff is decent and gets me nodding along quite effectively up until that point.

In 1992 the band changed their name to Consumed and went off in a more punk rock oriented direction, leaving us with this remainig as the only testament to a promising, if technically limited, early UK death metal act. It is interesting if ultimately inessential UK death metal release that even a Dan Seagrave cover couldn't save from relative obscurity. 

Imperator were an early polish death metal act, forming in Łódź in 1984 and originally splitting up in 1993 with this 1991 album standing as their only official studio full-length. Their version of death metal maintains a strong thrash metal component, but this isn't the kind of deaththrash you would find on "Seven Churches", but it leans rather more towards the technical sides of both death and thrash metal with most tracks containing a surfeit of musical ideas that sees them lurching between different riffs and tempos, sometimes a little bit too much for my taste. I wouldn't go as far as to say that they opt for the staccato juxtaposition of riffs that many of the most technically-focussed death metal acts feature in their songwriting and most of the transitions are fairly fluid, so aren't especially jarring, but their songwriting technique seems to involve throwing a ton of ideas into the mix and seeing which stick.

Now don't get me wrong, I may have made it sound like I didn't enjoy this, but I actually did. Most of it works, with some very fine riffs and interesting transitions, I just get a little frustrated when the band deliver a killer-sounding riff, for it to evaporate seemingly mere moments later as a new idea occurs to them and the track develops in a new direction. On the whole the interesting stuff far outweighs the little frustrations which, to be honest, don't irritate me that much, but do need pointing out. Of course, if you are a died-in-the-wool tech-death head then Imperator may be a bit tame and unambitious for you, but they hit a nice mid-point for me between old-school deaththrash and more technical metal that combines the no-nonsense aggression of the one with the ambition of the other. The album also benefits from the old-school production which makes it sound less clinical and more organic than the over-produced, triggered-to-fuck, heavily compressed aural assaults that often pass for modern death metal production jobs.

Vocals are provided by Piotr "Bariel" Tomczyk who is also guitarist and main songwriter and don't really go for the deep gutteral growls of true death metal vocalists, but are more deaththrash-centric. Lyrically the band steep themselves in the occult and demonic, which in some quarters seems to have earned the album an unwarranted black metal secondary tag. The riffs are good and are sometimes even great, whilst the soloing isn't bad, but isn't especially impressive either, often coming off like a slightly more accomplished Kerry King. The rhythm section is fine, but the drums sound muted and could have been better served pushed up a bit in the mix as they sometimes feel like they are getting lost and only register as a distant, dull thud.

What it all amounts to is that if a mix of Slayer, Obituary and Atheist rocks your boat then you may well get a fair bit out of "The Time Before Time". It is far from a perfect album but the execution and ideas presented here are of sufficient quality to provide an interesting sidebar in the chronicles of early-90s death metal. On an interesting historical note, around the time of the album's release mainman Bariel was apparently forming a side project with Dead and Euronymous of Mayhem called Moon, which was scuppered by Dead's suicide. I can't help feeling that could have been an interesting outfit. The band have resurfaced at various points over the years, but usually without Bariel and without releasing any new studio material.