Review by Rexorcist for Negură Bunget - 'n crugu bradului (2002)

Neura Bunget are a band I've always somewhat appreciated for balancing their boldness in the avant-garde department with a consistent flow.  The album tight before their signature OM, named 'n crugu bradului, is known among black metal fans for pushing those boundaries, walking the tightrope until picking a love or hate side is basically unavoidable.  I suppose this is the album that cemented them as an experimental band.  I never really had a problem with it, personally.

When I first heard this album, I gave it a 94/100, almost matching their signature, OM, which had a 97.  In fact, I would even go as far as to say the opening epic (the album is divided into four 12-13 minute epics, each numerically named in Roman) is one of the finest black metal songs I've ever heard.  It's like what would happen if Rod Serling and Edgar Rice Burroughs decided to collab, and the end result was a Twilight Zone venture into the mythology of an ancient tribe.  As for the other songs, they deliver some new ideas while following up on the same format as the first, also showcasing another side of them by perfectly implementing light amounts of the folk sounds of their home country, Romania, like people have been doing it for fifty years.  There's one very mellow, lengthy and carefully constructed solo in the middle of III that just tugs at the back of your head, demanding that you try to go to sleep and let yourself be absorbed in the sound until you're rudely awakened by a black metal alarm blaring like a vulture.  Now some of the general black metal riffs here are not the most originally compose, but the production style allows the storminess of their black metal genre to burst through the headphones while going above the Richter scale.  The windiness aspect is made into a piece of wonderfully empty but chilling ambiance on IV which only allows the faint echoes of singing and guitars to bleed out, giving it personality.  It drags on just a little longer than I'd like before the black metal comes back, but it was still impressive.  even then, it includes alien whistling in the midsection that I honestly wanted more of.

This may come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who knows me, but IMO, 'n crugu bradului boasts a lot of brilliance in the way genres are played with among the more typical black metal riffs.  This could make the album a regular for me to blast while trying to drown out noises on the outside, and maybe just because I wanna soak up some of the weirdness.  Like I said in the first paragraph, when I first gave this album a spin, I gave it a 94.  I think I was right.