We now have the European "super jewel box" version of this pervo black metal classic in stock...

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 on 180 gram wax (and back in stock on CD, reissued a while back by Peaceville in digipack packaging), Carpathian Forest's 1998 debut album Black Shining Leather is where things really started to get sick. Originally released through Avantgarde Music, the album blended murky samples of hardcore pornography and BDSM films along with pungent bondage imagery, and boasts an unusually heavy bass guitar presence that gave this a much heavier sound than the usual blast of Nordic frost. Leather kicks off with the lusty black ambience of the title track before hurtling into the initial blast of raw, barbaric black metal, the song rife with savage thrash riffs and some wicked tempo changes; when these guys suddenly downshift from their ripping fast-paced thrash into one of their signature black n' roll sequences, it's absolutely ferocious. They also layer their raw ragged blackened violence with some off-kilter synthesizer sounds on this album that add a diseased, delirious atmosphere to this and subsequent songs. Tracks like "The Swordsmen" gallop and thrash through the black blizzard-visions, laced with passages of haunting kosmische synthesizer drift and shifting from there into equally eerie sounding stretches of symphonic-tinged blackness, while the likes of "Death Triumphant" plunge into slower, more doom-laden tempos and passages of anguished heaviness. The orchestral war-drums that introduce "Lunar Nights" heads into the sort of crawling, synth-smeared sludge that Carpathian Forest's demos were known for, before lurching into one of the album's most crushing passages of Wagnerian boogie. The loping black metal of "Sadomasochistic" drips with Sadeian imagery and seething bloodlust, and the band's taste for electronic synthcreep emerges again on "Lupus", a short piece of sleek neon-tinged synthesizer music laced with soft malevolent whispers and swirling horror movie atmospherics that start to edge into Goblin territory. More black n' roll terror and crushing bass-heavy blackened blast is found on "Pierced Genitalia" and "In Silence I Observe"; on "Third Attempt", vicious Frostian crush mixes with washes of dark electronic texture a la Klaus Schulze, and haunting classical acoustic guitars lilt behind waves of crushing riffage and the kosmische keyboards that billow out over the woozy, waltzing lurch of "The Northern Hemisphere". The very last song is one of the most interesting, though: Carpathian Forest close this album with their cover of The Cure's "A Forest", and it's a surprisingly faithful rendition of this classic post-punk song; the band stays true to the structure and feel of the original while incorporating some of their strange little touches to transform this into something unique, the distorted guitar rendered into a shimmering corroded pulse in the background, the motorik throb of the drums ticktocking deep in the mix, sometimes washing out into a bleary indistinct beat as the clean, reverb-drenched guitars grow more dissonant as it slowly fades off into the dark woodland shadows...