Emerging from an ever-deeper sea of east coast American power electronics/death industrial projects, Blessed Sacrifist pushes genre affiliations with black metal in a manner not underlined so heavily since MZ.412’s mid-1990s desecrations. Clean and simple lines dominate ‘Loss Of Innocence’, evoking the wracked despair of black metal at its misanthropic core: the slow descent and raw vocals of the genre’s depressive introspection, and acknowledging an almost religious solemnity in the treatment of its cold melodies and stripped back textures.
The mission statement is “Isolate Form”, a minor key chordal repetition the building block for an intense, melancholic hymn escalated by fraught vocals and swarming synth. Like all of ‘Loss Of Innocence’ the brush strokes are wide and careful even if the only colour is black, the piece’s ten minutes layered slowly and carefully, baring its musical inspiration across a confined death industrial instrumentation. “Failing Grasp” balances those same sensibilities just as skilfully, blending spook and melodic frown with the darker end of the Berlin School output: the back-of the-classroom synth somnolence of Tangerine Dream’s ‘Zeit’ and Klaus Schulze’s ‘Cybotron’ cast into a burning church.
Bludgeoning elements give ‘Loss Of Innocence’ its peaks, a suffocating opening to the title track drenched in blast beat admiration and manifested as textural saturation, and climaxing again through “Eclipse Of Winds (Forward)”’s immolating distortion which lays waste to the second half of the piece: a track which also veers into full musicality with its opening two chord riff, a poorer overt recognition of the release’s spiritual genesis than “Clandestine Despair”, a stand-alone minor chord arpeggiation which is slightly out of tune and dullened with a strong hint of Carpathian Forest’s early atmospheric pieces. The musical detail is a little flat, but its inclusion is important to fully explain ‘Loss Of Innocence’.
What these tracks expose, however, is the slow pace to the CD: an intentional reflection of the cyclic dysphoria which has haunted black metal since Burzum. Like the dispersive sub-genre it evokes Blessed Sacrifist’s languid and repetitive nature can sink into tedium with the wrong listener or mindset: the focus on mood is paramount, but when not shared by the listener the work can drag in various settings and at different stages of immersion. It’s a message I share some times, but not always: when not fully committed to its atmosphere my point of departure – and while still impressed by its clean and harrowing delivery – is the length and repetitive simplicity of the pieces.
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