Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...

Now reissued in a new 2013 vinyl edition (and back in stock on CD via the latest Peaceville edition in digipack packaging), Through Chasm, Caves And Titan Woods is a classic slab of Norwegian black metal ready to be rediscovered both by longtime fans of the band and newcomers to their quirky, misanthropic metal. After a handful of hard-to-find demo tapes released in the early 90s, Carpathian Forest put out this vicious nineteen minute EP on the cult label Avantgarde Music in 1995. Opening with the crushing Frostian sludge and twisted black metal of the band's classic anthem "Carpathian Forest", Carpathian Forest quickly establishes their rough, feral sound through a violent combination of droning buzzsaw riffs and frenetic thrash metal, fronted by the ghastly gargling croak of guitarist/singer Nattefrost. That classic necro attack continues into the second song "The Pale Mist Hovers Towards the Nightly Shores", but here the listener also gets their first glimpse at Carpathian Forest's prowess at vicious black n' roll riffage, a violent swingin' groove that suddenly comes from out of nowhere, sending the song into a lethal new direction as the band's violent, demonic energy is brought into sharp focus. From there, they head into the melodramatic dungeon-synth of "The Eclipse / The Raven", a melancholy bit of warped, atmospheric organ and maudlin classical guitar that serves as a backdrop to Nattefrost's wretched whispered delivery of the lyrics, which draw from the original text of Edgar Allen Poe's poetry, followed by the more brutal Celtic Frost-esque thrashpunk filth of "When Thousand Moons Have Circled". The closer is one of my favorite Carpathian Forest songs ever, a total classic (also featured in demo form on the Bloodlust and Perversion collection); "Journey Through the Cold Moors of Svarttjern" trudges like some slow symphonic war-march, the steady pounding percussion and dark choral synths turning this into something more akin to a heavy, hellish take on a martial industrial jam or some sort of strident neo-folk than the feral Frostian black metal that makes up most of the EP, with Nattefrost's desperate screams echoing far off in the distance, the guitar rendered into a droning black buzz threading its way through the track's harsh, otherworldly ambience.