The French black metal scene gets alot of coverage around here due to my ongoing obsession with the weird, often avant-garde music that has been coming out of that country over the past two decades, but theres another European black metal scene that's just as tweaked and amazing and possessed with it's own unique sound that I haven't had as much of an opportunity to explore, that being the BM underground emerging from the Ukraine. There have been a handful of Ukrainian bands that we've carried here at C-Blast in the past, Drudkh being one of the most popular that we've stocked, and as I've continued to dig deeper into the story behind Drudkh and it's members, I've come across some related bands that have turned out to be pretty fucking incredible as well. Astrofaes hails from the city of Kharkiv in the Ukraine, and features members of Drudkh, Blood Of Kingu, Hate Forest, and Khors, but where those bands often incorporate quite a bit of folkish melody into their sound, Astrofaes goes for a much more ferocious sound, mighty hyperspeed black metal brutality with a touch of death metal, especially in the gutteral vocals of singer/guitarist Thurios. There is plenty of melodic guitarwork in AStrofaes's music though, but instead of the almost wistful, mournful melodies of Drudkh, the riffs and occasional keyboards here are triumphant, evil, and thoroughly coated in frost and hatred.
2007's Idea Form Essence is the sixth album from Astrofaes, and one of their heaviest. The death metal elements really come to the fore this time around, with lots of crushing midpaced chug and the vocals even more bestial and gutteral than ever. Fast as fuck too, with awesome hyperspeed blastbeats littered everywhere, situated pefectly alongside raging midtempo parts. Definitely picking up on the ferocious Hate Forest sound in a big way, but more polished, and much heavier, a feirce blast of brutal black metal majesty with incredible riffs, blazing, crushing drumming and those insanely brutal vocals. Throws a bit of a curveball with the last track, a strangely proggy song called "In The Fog" that starts off soft and folky and psychedelic, with chorus-heavy clean guitars and droning synths, then moves into thunderous midpaced metallic churn before taking off at full blast into epic highspeed blasting that goes back and forth between fast and unfuckinggodly mach 20 blastbeats that threaten to shake the teeth right out of my jaw - and then the song suddenly changes direction back into the mellower jangly section, before moving onto an epic loping Drudkh style riff.
Comes with a thick sixteen page full color booklet that includes lyrics in both English and Cyrillic.