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BLACK CRUCIFIXION  Coronation Of King Darkness  CD   (Seance)   11.98


���� Was kind of surprised that Coronation didn't seem to get more attention from the outr� metal crowd when it originally came out. The third album from these long-running Finnish black metallers is a compelling combination of their blackened heaviness and sinister avant-prog, which I thought was one of the more effective albums of its kind. It definitely taps into a bunch of my favorite sounds - Nephilim-esque goth rock, Frostian crush, violent black metal, vintage 70's-era progressive rock - and bring it all together into this rousing album that has a strong current of surrealistic strangeness.

���� This is a newer Australian reissue of Coronation, which originally came out on Spinefarm/Svart back in 2013. Although Black Crucifixion has been around for about as long as their pals in Beherit, and delivered a similarly oddball (though totally different) brand of black metal in their early days, these guys have remained less well known, at least over here in the US. They've put out some killer stuff over the years though, from the bestial blackness of their earliest demos to the low-fi Frostian weirdness of the Promeathean Gift EP and the crushing gothic metal of 2006's Faustian Dream. Through all of this stuff, they've pursued an experimental agenda that made 'em more interesting than most bands from that era, and a lot of their stuff was tinged with a subtle death rock influence - you can really tell that these guys were big fans of old Christian Death.

���� On Coronation Of King Darkness, Black Crucifixion's black metal origins still blare through these eight songs loud and clear, as does their long held Celtic Frost influences, but when the guitars start to unfold into soaring, spacey leads and complex, almost Floydian melodies, this stuff can get pretty proggy. It sort of has a similar vibe as recent works from Ihsahn and Enslaved, combining strong metallic riffing and pummeling double-bass rhythms with bursts of furious speed and blackened tremolo picking, but then that morose goth rock element rears its head once you get into the second song "What The Night Birds Sang", dark and brooding and catchy. The songwriting is fairly straightforward, with moments of moody grandeur that wouldn't sound out of pace on a particularly heavy late 80's goth album; when the twangy guitars start weeping all over songs like "Gallows", it's vaguely reminiscent of Fields Of The Nephilim. But then elsewhere those echoes of prog get intertwined with strange electronic melodies and more aggressive blasts of rampaging black metal, or gloomy acoustic guitars drifting around massive sludgy riffs, haunting passages where the metallic crush is fused to the drone of woodwinds, and the guttural, consonant-heavy quality of the Finnish-language lyrics add a harshness to the music that makes this all the more distinctive. Really great stuff, definitely worth checking out if you're into more adventurous stuff with undercurrents of classic gothic metal. Has some terrific album art from Erkki Nampajarvi too, which adorns the album in a weird Boschian tableau.


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