To His Kingdom

From my distant beginnings as an amateur and columnist, I am regularly confronted with some incomprehensible artistic aberrations. Thus, I remain cautious when a musician chooses to stifle his work under a poor production. With home recording democratization, access costs to a professional studio no longer have the same impact as before. Nowadays, if an album has an awful sound, it is a deliberate choice and – in my opinion – a hardly excusable one.

This preliminary observation is based on my unfortunately repeated listening of Aura Saturnal first album, called To His Kingdom. This Finnish solo project is rampant in the raw black metal delicate register, from which it adopts all ridicule aesthetic codes. I humbly admit I have never been able to listen to the entire album at once. Irritation invariably won me after a few minutes so I proceeded by short sequences instead.

Damn! Where to start? Perhaps by this record’s uniformly bad sound. Like other albums of the same register, songs are covered with an extremely unpleasant distortion layer that hides playing and arrangements. However, musical content is generally acceptable and some riffs are pretty well-turned. Then why the hell destroy these commendable efforts with a shitty production? Total mystery.

Vocals are the album’s second really disagreeable element. Most of the time, we seem to hear an animal whining and complaining. It gets on my nerves after few seconds! Imagine then a whole album! Unbearable. This is an aspect that would be relatively easy to improve, but it probably would violate the band’s aesthetic imperatives.

Let’s try to remain positive and emphasize on some interesting musical bases proposed by Aura Saturnal’s member. They could probably reach their full potential in an adequate sound environment. However, I do not think it’s the group’s objective because – like many others – it seems to believe that black metal must sound awful to feel authentic.

Originally written for Métal Obscur.