Stream of Black Hills

Nocturnal is dubbed as an extreme/brutal act within the black metal paradigm, and there might be a little something to that. This is among the more auspicious independent projects I’ve seen come out of France, and they have a fairly interesting concept going for them. The obvious and principle influence at work here is Mayhem circa “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas”, particularly in terms of overall song construction. The riff work consists largely of a continuous flurry of rapid paced chords, strummed in a ludicrously fast succession, occasionally dropping down to a slow breakdown when the chords are struck singularly.

There’s a small, haunting, clean guitar line at the beginning and the end of “Stone Of Dark Moon”, and “Stream Of Black Hills” deviates a little from the formula and offers up a couple of slower thrash riffs and throws out another gloomy broken clean guitar line, but otherwise this is demo is a one trick pony. It’s definitely a treat for those who like brutality mixed in with their sepulchral sound paintings, as the blasting gets extreme enough to rival most grindcore acts out there today, and vocalist Zworxk literally sounds like the ghost of a banshee that is being punished with repeated clitoral circumcisions. I swear that Maniac didn’t get this morose sounding on his worst day.

This isn’t something that I normally go for, but at times I’m reminded of the black/death hybrid work that Frost Like Ashes did on “Tophet”, albeit through a much lower quality medium without all the technical elements and keyboard work. But for those who won’t go within 10 miles of a Christian band, the best analogy I can come up with is taking either Emperor or Odium, stripping out all of the esoteric keyboard sounds, and increasing the tempo by about 70%. If this sounds like something that could barely be followed by the human ear, you’re pretty much on the right track.