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BANN  Antiochia  CD   (Grief Foundation)   10.98


���Just unearthed a handful of copies of this now out-of-print 2007 mini-album from the obscure German duo Bann, a band who only managed to released this and one subsequent full-length album (2009's �schatologia) before going dormant. Released by the now defunct British label Grief Foundation who put out a number of killer releases in the late oughts from the likes of White Medal, Krieg, Caina, Swine and Axis Of Advance, Antiochia establishes it's dour, drear mood from the classic Gustave Dor� cover art before sinking into the three long sprawling tracks of blackened, doom-laden misery that make up the disc. It's a pretty straightforward sound that these guys were going for, mixing intensely sorrowful black metal with suffocating slow-motion tempos and morose atmosphere that heavily draws from the classic UK deathdoom of My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost, but Bann turned that into something a bit more interesting than your standard-fare gloomdealers by incorporating doleful neo-classical elements, heavily atmospheric kosmische synthesizers, and even the occasional tint of baroque progginess, a combination that put this disc into some heavy rotation here in the C-Blast office back when it first came out.

��� Each of Antiochia's epic tracks wallow in the band's mix of Teutonic misery and dour philosophical musings, their often agonizingly slow, exquisitely bleak sound occasionally reminiscent of fellow German gloomsters Bethlehem, injecting their miserable lumbering heaviness with bursts of faster-paced black metal, while distant shrieks of abject despair mingle with the more prominent serpentine rasp of frontman Hoffarth. Definitely a sound that I'm a big fan of. But then the duo will color their sorrowful, nihilistic symphonics and doom-laden blackness with haunting melodies that swirl through these tracks, and those ghostly woodwind-like arrangements and whirling piano parts give parts of this an unexpectedly Goblin-esque vibe; there's a couple moments on here where those vaguely proggy elements actually remind me of the Italian spook-prog masters' classic score for Phenomena. Elsewhere, grim chamber-string arrangements lurch across sudden descents into crushing doom, or segue into sections where the music will suddenly drop away, leaving only the sounds of a raging oceanic surf and echoing German voices, or drift into the sound of forlorn acoustic guitars weaving shadowy madrigals amidst the remnants of rumbling blackness. But in the end, it's those spooky, cinematic blasts of atmospheric creep weaving through Antiochia's buzzing, Burzumic doom which shine as the disc's most enthralling moments.


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