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.

Compared to the brutal hyperspeed black metal of Astrofaes 2997 album Idea Form Essence, this 2005 album is much closer in sound to the member's work in Drudkh, with more of a folk influence on the melodies and mournful atmosphere that appears on some of these songs. Make no mistake though, Those Whose Past Is Immortal is a ferocious album, filled with furious blastbeats and whiplash inducing tempo changes, beautiful melodies entwined around fierce minor key riffs, and it sounds alot like the early Drudkh stuff, but with an almost nonstop relentless blastbeat attack. Like most of the Ukrainian black metal that I've heard so far, this is ferocious and majestic, and highly recommended to fans of both Drudkh and Hate Forest.