Alma... uma Floresta de Dor

Some might think this first album by Portuguese depressive black metal act Black Howling has an incredibly shitty and trashy tinny sound and equally terrible production; my opinion is that the sound suits the duo's purpose of creating a bleak and despairing piece of music. Surely if the sound of a recording agrees with and enhances its purpose and agenda, its quality even if accidental shouldn't matter? At the very least the sound keeps the listener on edge, wondering and fearing what will happen during the course of this one-track opus.

Indeed, play this 43-minute piece loudly enough and you'll discover a hypnotic beauty in those cheap-sounding guitars: there's something sharp and diamond-like in that churning factory-ambience grind. The drumming is fairly basic slow time-keeping. The low-end bass is quite interesting for taking a lead melody in the otherwise repetitive looping. Although this music is intended to be quite heavy-going, it also comes off sounding surprisingly light and so it avoids plummeting into overblown bombast territory, which it so easily could have done if the Black Howling duo had had access to superior recording facilities and fancy equipment.

When they appear, the vocals are high and screechy for this kind of doomy depressive slow-chugging black metal. There is plenty of anger, despair and fear in the screaming, as if the vocalist fears going completely insane.

Changes that occur are more in the details of the music so the track as a whole appears unchanging yet it does morph gradually. Tension increases as well. Changes in the percussion rhythms might be noticed more than in the riffs: the drums start speeding up and their rhythms get choppy about the halfway point, disrupting the smooth flow of the music. It's mainly in the last 10 minutes of the track that the music becomes interesting as a definite low-end melody arises out of the morass and the instruments start going their separate ways. There is more spoken vocal as the music proceeds; though the lyrics are in Portuguese, listeners not familiar with the language definitely get a sense of the vocalist being lost in a growing inner torment and anguish.

The music could have been edited for length as much of it is repetitive and the tinny abrasive noise can be a tiring endurance trial for some listeners. On the plus side, the music holds up very well as a single entity (though perhaps at the price of sounding monotonous) even through parts where it appears to fall apart.The overall impression is of bleakness, sheer despair and helplessness as a black madness steadily creeps over the vocalist. When the critical point of no return arrives, the victim succumbs without a fight and that moment, calm as it is, is the most terrifying part of the work.