Review by Vinny for Black Cilice - Banished From Time (2017)
“Buy everything they have put out! You will not be disappointed!”
“Perfect in every way.”
“Quite simply the best black metal album of this millennium…”
These are just some of the accolades posted on the Bandcamp page for this release. High praise indeed, as you can all see. For an artist that I have never heard of until this month, it appears that I may have been missing out on an underground treat based on these lashing of superlatives at least. With demos appearing as far back as 2009, Black Cilice are hardly a new outfit either. Perhaps their shady persona/s have kept them off my radar, given that “none” is the consistent lineup information for each release they have done (a similar trait to fellow Portuguese bm outfit, Candelabrum). The cavernous black metal, littered with Xasthur-esque howled vocals, produced with a muffled overall sound effect, certainly points to a one-man project. Raw is the order of the day here, and whilst that can spell “indecipherable tosh” for some ears, to me it is my preferred style nowadays.
Having done a couple of listens through the record now, I am not as excited by it as some of those exuberant reviewers are. Likewise, I cannot say I dislike the album either. One of the key aspects that I do find challenging are the raw values in the production, as they aren’t all that raw to my ears. The vocals most certainly are, but the rest of the sound has such a muffled filter applied that it almost blunts the rawness of the intended approach. This can make listening to tracks quite a jolting and disorientating experience (closing track ‘Boiling Corpses’ being a particularly difficult one to follow).
Yet, I must balance the above against the melodic tremolo that shines through on ‘Timeless Spectre’. Spending some headphone time with Banished from Time does unearth more detail that is otherwise buried in the initial, speaker-only based listening experience. The acute sense of isolation and desperation of the vocals take on a whole new level of impact when you bring the music that bit closer. It sounds like there is someone trapped somewhere cavernous, howling out all the negativity of their life in its most terrifying moment. I would describe Banished from Time as a culmination of sound. The pinnacle of pity, sorrow and suffocating misery laid bare in audible format. In a way it is acceptable for things to sound lost, for the component parts to clash in places to highlight the confusion around such a tumult of emotions. Maybe that jolting and disorientating effect is more intentional than I first thought. Definitely one for future revisits as not sure I have a full wrap around on this release yet.