Akitsa / Satanic Warmaster

Akitsa

A slow acoustic introduction, similar to Fur Elise but on guitar, followed by raw, evil black metal. I’m reminded a lot of Vlad Tepes: raw, tremolo picked riffs that each spawn a third of the song; furious yet quiet blast beats hammering down the flow of the song beneath the thick buzz of noise; an eerie void where the bass should be; and hateful, distorted vocals shrieking along with the music. There’s nothing too original here, just one song that uses a total of two riffs with a pretty standard guitar solo and some shrieking.

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Satanic Warmaster

Punk-driven catchiness from the start. Dirty overdriven guitars create incredibly groovy tunes under which Vholm lays his bass/snare variants. The bass is thick and prominent, particularly at the end of “March of the Legion Werwolf”, creating a pseudo-bluesy feel. On top of all this stands Werwolf’s vocals: surrounded in filthy distortion, standing proud amongst the corpses of the modern black metal scene’s wannabes, spewing forth the chants of true evil. “Six Million Tears” is a true headbanging tune too, though it ends rather abruptly to give way to the most fantastic outro in the history of black metal: 22 seconds of Striborg-type ambience accompanied by shrieks of true terror.

Black metal at its finest.

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