RH-07

Rhinocervs is the name of both a record label and a pair of musicians, associated with the Blue Twilight Circle of black metal / psychdelic bands, who run the label. Under that umbrella, the musicians have issued nine cassettes of original music, all of which simply carry their label catalogue numbers as their titles. RH-07 is the fourth release in the series: the musicians skipped numbers 3 to 6 and RH-08 was released before RH-07. Like some of its other siblings, the tape is short, running at less than 25 minutes in total, and features some eye-arresting artwork suggesting sinister forces at work throughout the cosmos.

It starts in very dramatic and ominous fashion, guitars all groaning, drums warming up and a choir of voices roaring away in the background, as though all are preparing for a secret and dark ritual calling upon black gods that roam unseen through the distant skies. For a short album, there are eight tracks, most of them quite short and therefore not much more than mere impressionistic snapshots of something much, much larger. A couple of tracks end very abruptly even as if to emphasise their movie-trailer nature. Of the pieces that actually sound like songs with a definite beginning, middle, end and some development therein, track 3 is an early highlight of very trance-like evil and delirious psychedelic black metal with sprawling voluptuous guitar noise, lazy feedback howl, a serpentine rhythm and a slow raspy vocal; the lead guitar solo alone has a great trumpeting sound. Another quite incredible track comes near the end (this is track 7) with off-kilter retro-60s space ambient effects introducing a furious song of blast-beat percussion rhythm, mysterious organ tones and plenty of noise-guitar shredding and shrill lead guitar solo squealing.

The short pieces are not bad either as brief and static portraits of what might have been (or, it's to be hoped, might be yet to come), ranging from majestic and epic drone doom to something that simulates a Tibetan Buddhist religious festival music soundtrack, to deep-space ambient. Special mention must be made of the final track which has an interesting clunky rhythm with treated guitar that sounds quite sharp and sparkly beneath some rather studied dyspeptic monster groaning.

Even though the recording can be frustrating in the number of good tracks that suddenly cut off, not to be revisited (for the time being), it's worth hunting down for its often experimental nature and unusual sounds in a raw black metal context. There are some very good ideas that are worth further development if the guys would care to take them up again at a later stage. Apart from some of the vocals which can sound a bit cookie-monster campy, not a bad thing is to be found on this recording. It's creepy and has a real sense of dark Lovecraftian science fiction horror.