header_image
CAITHNESS  Apostasy & the Sorrowful Child  CD   (Kaosthetik)   13.98
Apostasy & the Sorrowful Child IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

The newish stuff that came in from Kaosthetik has been consistently high-quality post-industrial sound of a darker bent, and this Caithness disc is so far the easiest on the ears of anything that I've checked out from the label. Crafting a kind of gothic religious ambience, Caithness effectively evokes the mournful, utterly bleak industrial darkwave of the early Raison D'etre albums on Cold Meat Industries and pulls it off much more adeptly than most. Starting off with the track "Sortie De Terre", Caithness creates an ominous, elegiac soundworld of doleful strings, gently finger picked acoustic guitar, distant clanging metal, portentous tolling bells, the atmosphere consistently dark and sorrowful, often joined by hushed voices, spoken word samples, and lush female choirs. Long stretches of the album go by without percussion, but occasionally a martial snare will appear, turning the music into a misery filled funeral march. More abrasive industrial elements appear on "Faces And Shades", taking form with abstract metallic clang, but it's soon subsumed into deep ominous drones, orchestral strings and Gregorian chants flowing into a grim liturgical dronescape. Elsewhere in the album, Lustmord-like black ambience, deep cello-like drones and distant mist-enshrouded cathedral keys emerge, and the vocals shift into sorrowful operatic singing, or the sound of a deep male voice reciting strange incantations in French through a veil of static. "The Sorrowful Child" is especially amazing with the gorgeous lilting female vocals that give the song a big Dead Can Dance vibe. It's kind of surprising that the guy behind Caithness, Hylgaryss, has also done worked with some of the French black metal scene's harshest outfits like Kristallnacht, Sacrificia Mortuorum, and Chemin de Haine (as well as being the sole intelligence behind the loner black metal project Winter Funeral), but it makes more sense when you find that he's also one of the main members of the well-known neo-classical band Dark Sanctuary, whose lush orchestral sound is definitely echoed in the ecclesiastical, cinematic ambience of Apostasy. Comes in a six-panel digisleeve with a full color booklet, and is limited to 1000 copies.


Track Samples:
Sample :
Sample :
Sample :