Into the Coven

Into the Coven: Necromantia – Scarlet Evil Witching Black Review

Necromantia are one of the more curious and immediately striking bands in black metal. The Hellenic BM scene was, outside of a couple outliers in the Scandinavian countries (eg Dissection, Immortal etc), the most traditional heavy metal of the bunch – after all, it is why RiG has a big ‘ol primer on the scene. Of the big bands, Necromantia is perhaps the most musically “traditional metal” of the bunch, while also being musically one of the more radical bands of their brood.

Into the Coven

Into the Coven Album Premiere: Flamekeeper – “We Who Light the Fire” with an Interview

Flamekeeper is the natural result of the journey from Italy to Sweden for Marco S., the main person behind occult black/death metal band Demonomancy and also The Devil’s Mark Studio. Carrying Mediterranean influences like Necromantia with him, he arrived at the epic metal masterpiece, Hammerheart by Bathory. The debut effort of Flamekeeper is an approach to that Hammerheart sound that is rooted more in black metal in spirit, yet with plenty of clean heavy metal sounding sections.

Into the Coven

Into the Coven: Agatus – The Eternalist Review

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.

Into the Coven

Into the Coven: Varathron – Patriarchs of Evil Review

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.