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Dead Raven Choir > Cask Strength Black Metal > Reviews
Dead Raven Choir - Cask Strength Black Metal

Hymns from the Abyss - 100%

eaterofthoughts, March 20th, 2008

This is something quite different. Dead Raven Choir plays harsh raw black metal covers of traditional European and American folk and country songs. Dead Raven choir turns up the distortion on his bass guitar to mammoth buzzing heights, bows his bass fiddle, and snarls and screams songs by Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, traditional European and American folk, and the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The music mostly drifts along at a slow, rolling pace, with the wash of distortion smearing into a serene sound scape, and the bass fiddle, which sounds like a cello to me, leads most of the melody. The vocals are way back and drift in and out, completely raspy and shredded. I'm pretty sure many of the vocals are in another language which just adds to the mood. Some songs have the low din of drone scape underlying the music too. While most of the music is harsh, eerie, cold and abrasive, much of it is still somehow quite peaceful.

This music sounds as if it is clearly conjured from some ether realms. The conjurer is a man by the name of D Smolken, from Poland. Dead Raven Choir is obsessed with Wolves. Some of the other album titles are "In all Poems there are Wolves", "Wine, Women and Wolves", and "Dwelling in a Winter Goat Towards Northern Wolves". Dead Raven Choir has released many works put forth by various obscure, artistic labels including Catsun, the fantastic Aurora Borealis, the Jewelled Antler Collective and the Brazos Valley Meat Authority. Amoung their varied and unique offerings are official hand made cd-rs, all sorts of limited cassettes and lavish vinyl sets. This double cd release was handled by Supernal Music label in the UK. The vinyl version was produced by Weird Forest, and is a massive triple lp box with all sorts of vellum inserts and fine extras.

Cask Strength Black Metal is a collection of the complete first e.p. from 2001 the four track "Sheath and Knife", and their second e.p. from 2002, "Grand Ravishing Extravaganza". Both originally were released on extremely limited cd-rs and are long out of print. The second disk has the also OOP eps from 2003 and 2004, "Sevenfold Songs of Death" and "Sturmfuckinglieder".