At some point between their debut full-length and today, Slovenian heavy metal band Vigilance had two ideas for their future career: get a new logo and add black metal into their sound. As much as I like their NWOBHM-worshipping, cleaner traditional metal debut; looking back now I can say that both those decisions are proven to be steps in the right direction.
What happens when a man takes off his Bathory crop top and wear Pink Turns Blue shirts for promo-shoots of his new album? Not necessarily bad things.
A normal album review process for me usually goes like either of these: (a) it is an album I like and I know others with somewhat similar taste will also like it, or (b) it is an album that didn’t really work for me and I know others with similar interests in music won’t be impressed by it, either. So far for this website I’ve only written about albums I love and I know readers with similar taste would like. Then came Mana.
Reverse engineering is the deconstruction of an object to reveal the components, patterns, or essence of it. It is the process of analyzing an aircraft piece when there is no documentation available to make out the chemical and physical structure of it, or tracing back to the source code of a software when it was lost using the bits of the machine code sent to the processor, or breaking down Hellenic black metal to extract the pure epic heavy metal essence of it.
The time period we call a year, that is entirely based on our small planet and our star, probably has no significance whatsoever in the grand scheme of the universe. However, it is a great interval to use as containers and compare the art that is crafted in one within itself and the popularity of end-of-the-year lists seems to support this approach. This helps human brain to catalogue and categorize experiences when people think back about the past. Sometimes schedules of the artists align and we end up with good release after good release in the span of a year. It is the reason we hear from people things such as “1984 was a great year for traditional heavy metal”, or “do you think 2016 was a better year than 2011 for heavy metal releases?”. I strongly believe that when looking back in ten years, 2019 similarly will be remembered as one of the strongest years of contemporary heavy metal history.
You are the drummer of a band taking its cues from the early heavy metal sound and from several 70s rock inspired NWOBHM bands. What do you do in your own free time between working on the albums of your band? The answer for Oskari Räsänen, Mausoleum Gate drummer, is apparently to write some melodic heavy/proto metal for his side project. That side project which initially began as a solo act, Iron Griffin, has been where he channels his creative output lately. Taking the reins all by himself this time around, Räsänen would still aim for a very old school, mature sound like his main band but this time it is more melodic, calm, epic, and grandiose than ever before.
The occult themes, heavy use of the purple, and tendency to get weird have always been prevalent in the heavy metal history of a specific country: Italy, the birthplace of “violet doom metal”. In the same era of Italian traditional doom metal, some other local bands, like Bulldozer or Necrodeath, were pushing the limits of the sound towards extremity, making a dent in the first wave black metal history. However, none of these bands had that “Italian weird occult” touch in their sound until a group of young people who were obsessed by necromancy set out to play music.
Evil comes in different shapes. In South America, the shape it assumed was mostly primitive, raw, and dirty until The World Is So Good That Who Made It Doesn’t Live Here was released. Finding an early interest in extreme metal in 80s, many South American bands experimented with filthy sounds that had not been quite discovered before their time. A record store that was already active before this particular kind of extreme metal rose, Cogumelo Records, became the meeting spot for a lot of early Brazilian first wave black, death, and thrash metal bands. The best example of the thrashy, primitive, aggressive sound of the region from that era would be the cult album, I.N.R.I., by Sarcófago.
Eastern Europe, where some reserved folks live and mostly keep to themselves. Amongst those folks, Slovakians witnessed a lot of political volatility in the recent past which resulted in the separation of Czech Republic and Slovakia in early 90s. This civil unrest resulted in the rise of a small circle of black metal artists in the more recent past which formed the foundation of Malokarpatan along with other projects like Krolok, Temnohor, and Algor.
The Greeks who would become the prominent members of what we call the Hellenic black metal scene experimented with different sounds before reaching their final shape. Some of them started their journey playing raw, aggressive grindcore and spent years chasing a contract for their debut. Others tried out the early death metal sound before taking part in one of the cornerstone splits of the country. Through experimentation and desire to find their unique approach to “evil metal”, Greeks cultivated their own sound, which resulted in what could be considered the most important wave of Hellenic black metal releases around 1992.