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BAL-SAGOTH  The Chthonic Chronicles  CD   (Metal Mind)   15.99


I've only now become a fan of Bal-Sagoth after digging into the new re-issues of their last three albums came out on Metal Mind. I never paid much attention to these UK metallers in the past as I've never been a big fan of what you'd call "symphonic metal", but when Metal Mind dropped these gorgeous-looking re-issues, I went ahead and checked them out and ended up falling under the bombastic thrall of Bal Sagoth almost immediately. Presented in newly designed glossy digipacks in a machine-numbered edition of two thousand copies each, these albums look amazing, their bright full-color album art looking like something off some bizarre Japanese video game...

For Bal-Sagoth's sixth (and most recent) album, 2006's The Chthonic Chronicles, the infamous blackened soundtrack metallers returned to the surface from the depths of Atlantis to document another Lovecraftian saga, this time involving evil oceanic leviathans and ancient star-gods, lost books of arcane knowledge and scenes of epic warfare. It's all outlined and narrated in the booklet that comes with the disc, thankfully, as the Bal-Sagoth just blasts your senses with the crushing black power metal of Chronicles. The story reads like a large scale updating of the Cthulhu mythos, and the music is majestic, complex, bringing together walls of proggy synthesizer and spacey electronic textures with the vicious scorched vocals and crushing riffs. This could be Bal-Sagoth's most "prog" album yet, the music and arrangements are more sprawling and elaborate than on the previous record Atlantis Ascendant, with forays into cosmic electronica and dark cinematic ambience ("The Fallen Kingdoms of the Abyssal Plain"), stirring symphonic pieces ("To Storm the Cyclopean Gates of Byzantium"), horns, chanting, whole string sections and plenty of crazed, hyper-complex shreddery appearing all over the album.


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