���I've been enjoying my recent trawl through the catalog of the now defunct German label Memento Mori, which has dredged up quite a stack of albums I'd never heard before. Lots of interesting artifacts from the late-90s satanic industrial/black ambient underground in particular, as the imprint tended to specialize in much darker sounds than its parent label, Dark Vinyl, an early home for the likes of Controlled Bleeding, MZ.412, Lustmord, The Gerogerigegege and Rozz Williams solo works. Elhaz's The Black Flame is one of my favorite Memento Mori releases, the one and only album from this mysterious outfit that hass been described by some as "neo-classical", though that only touches on one part of Elhaz's sound. There's certainly quite a bit of classically-influenced music here, employing an array of orchestral sounds (string sections, horns), but the band also incorporates some great vintage synthesizer that bring a cinematic quality to this stuff as well. Take the opening track "Pilgrimage" for instance, which sounds like it could have come off of one of John Carpenter's later film scores. But Elhaz is also heavily steeped in a kind of coarse, gothic post-industrial, heard in the slow, doom-laden gloom of "Glory" that sounds like a blackened version of First And Last And Always-era Sisters Of Mercy, the grim melodies and sinister baritone vocals winding around swells of metallic guitar and furious drum machine programming. This mix of sounds across the first few tracks give this an odd, off-kilter feel, but it doesn't take long for Flame to weave its strange satanic vibe.

��� The rest of the album moves through waves of grinding synthesizer and ominous vocal samples that build into shambling, militaristic death industrial marches, or blend bleak, funerary horns and cello-like minor key strings with burbling black electronica. "Blessed" slowly unfolds into another terrific piece of industrialized goth rock, that Sisters / Nephilim-esque sound married to slow, mechanical beats and mournful symphonics, the singer's deep Eldritch baritone echoing over the slow-motion bombast, and joined by distant crushing droning metallic guitars, eventually turning into this weird cross between classic 80's goth and Godfleshian industrial crunch. More of those horns appear on the elegiac "Bloodthrone", shaping the song into a neo-folky sound, and the latter portion of Flame drifts out into even vaster realms of kosmische choral majesty and menacing industrial creep, with bits of skittering, Coil-esque derangement, and swells of baleful bombast on tracks like "Devil" that almost suggest a trip-hop remix of Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness score being perpetrated by Norwegian weirdos Manes. Definitely a weird mix, but I've really been digging this album. Been pretty obsessed with the Memento Mori catalog lately, and admittedly part of it is the nostalgic glow I get from listening to this sort of classic black/occult industrial stuff, but while some of the albums that came out on the label admittedly sound a bit dated, Elhaz's album has aged a little more gracefully. That's possibly due to the atmospheric synthwork that's so prominent here, which echoes classic horror-score style electronics, though I'm sure that the old-school gothic rock that creeps through this might grate on some listeners. Still, one to check out if you've been digging any of the other Memento Mori releases we've been getting in stock here.