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BLACK HOWLING / OSTOTS  split  CASSETTE   (Legion Blotan)   6.50
split IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

Another Legion Blotan tape of twisted, noisy and raw raw RAW black metal...sort of. On one side of the tape you have the Spanish band Ostots whose gnarled doom n' gloom has also been heard on recent Ep offerings from Seedstock, and on the other is a band called Black Howling that plays a kind of blackened downer rock that's more wrecked jangle than BM aggression.

Black Howling's "Cursed By The Ancient Forest" is a seventeen-minute long song that falls within the parameters of what some people call "depressive black metal", a descriptor that's getting more and more vague. Like so much of that sort of stuff, it's more gloomy, wretched rock than metal, and the strange, noisy post-punk guitars, stumbling guitar melodies and driving rhythms hit my brain matter like a withered mutation of early Cure. The jangly guitars push through a heavy fog of low-fi hiss and tape noise while the singer screeches insanely way off in the background, coming together as a weird mix of no-fi indie rock and black metal vocals. It's really ugly and messed-up for sure, with lots of snarled tape noise and a murky-as-hell recording, but this is all part of the appeal for me, the melodies making Black Howling's music weirdly pretty in its wretchedness. Like a strange version of "depressive" black metal interpreted through the noisy jangle of some old Homestead records band, this long song goes through a number of different parts, shifting into other gloomy melodies and driving rock, always maintaining the moody, noisy central melody, later breaking off into long stretches where the band drops out and one guitarist is left strumming the somber acoustic melody while flute-like keyboards lilt behind him. Worth checking out if yer a fan of stuff like Hypothermia, Amesoeurs and Trist...

On the other side, Ostots's "Lurraren Erraietan" is a fine match for Black Howling's anguished blackened jangle. It's another epic, too; a meandering eighteen minute long song that has some of the same elements (jangling melodic guitars, tons of gloomy atmosphere, the shreiking black metal style vocals, the murky low-fi rehearsal recording), but does something different with 'em by blending their driving, steady rock with stretches of abject doom and overall a much more metallic, heavy sound. When Ostots really slow it down, they get into noisy rumbling territory with anguished spoken vocals and a big bottom-heavy metallic crunch, almost like an old goth/post-punk band slowing down to a rumbling doom metal crawl; some of the more driving riffs that show up on "Lurraren" even remind me of early Sisters Of Mercy, and the very end of the song drifts out into a short coda of gloomy, Goblin-esque keyboards. Very cool. I really dug this too, and am already looking for more stuff from this Spanish trio.

Limited to one hundred copies.