Opus II - InnerSpectrum

Once I read a review for Opus I - Discipline of the Elements and they said that it was quite bad album. They considered this band a Darkthrone rip off. I was quite curious about this and when I found this CD at a decent price I listened to it. I must admit that the Darkthrone component is evident and audible but not for this it's so bad and annoying. Actually, there are various influences here from different groups and being stuck only into a band could be reductive.

This band, as you understood, plays a raw, primordial form of black metal that undoubtedly takes inspiration from the North countries but they have inside also that burden of occultism that is classical feature of the Italian background for the extreme genre. The heavier occult influences can be heard during the mid-paced parts when the atmosphere is gloomier and somehow more depressive too. The fast parts show good blast beats and a truly frozen guitars riffage.

I liked the production a lot because it’s fuzzy but not excessive and reminds a lot the one on the debut album by Taake or the one by old Wyrd. The guitars, as always, are the main element that gives the right, icy and desolated touch to the album. The tremolo pickings on higher tonality are really good and more or less they are present everywhere. Anyway, I want to mark out the ones in “Lucid Misanthropy” where there are also evocative breaks in pure Taake style. In these cases you can hear a very particular thing: the sound of the French horn that is truly particular and suggestive.

The vocals are obviously on the classical shriek pattern but in the various breaks we can meet whispered ones and some clean, pagan chants that are perfect to fill the air with a weird and more melodic atmosphere. The bass sound is incredibly metallic and can be heard everywhere because it’s very high in the volumes and the raw way it is played increases its presence. The songs’ structures are always quite catchy and recognizable because they point quite a lot on the good riffs by the guitars and on the frozen melody.

The two monologues contain the sound the horn again and here the atmosphere is truly dark. It’s like being in a wood at night with the sound of the wind and the one by the horn. There’s nothing else but these sounds and they are really gloom. The final “Black Void” features nine minutes of almost depressive black for the long down tempo parts and the sudden stops. Here I compared these sonorities to the old ones by Judas Iscariot. This is a prefect song to break the fast patterns of the other ones and lead us to the end of this good, unoriginal but cold black metal. Recommended to the fans of this style.