Macedonian Darkness and Evil

To be completely honest, when I first came across the album, which was falsely being advertised as "eastern-European" black metal due to the fact that the original member of this band, has Macedonian roots. When I found out after a few listens, that this band is from Australia, did not make any real or significant impact. The brand of black metal played by Baltak, is pure, unadulterated hateful raw black metal. The eastern European black metal scene is littered with raw-black metal acts, so it would have made complete sense if this band was truly from Macedonia.


Judging the album by its cover, it sort of reminded me the light-black and white artwork produced for bands such as Ildjarn, Graveland and more importantly, Moonblood. However, you should never judge an album by its artwork, so I put this cd in my cd-player, and embarked on a very interesting journey into the sonic-soundscape masterfully created by everyone involved in the creation of this album. The music presented to us on this full-length album is pretty impressive and it instantly crushed any bittersweet negative expectations I had set myself before diving ear-first into this release. The guitar-work on this album is pretty varied and consistent. There are moments when the guitars burst into a manic frenzy, we mostly associate with early proto-black thrash acts like Sarcofago, or more accurately, Sodom and Kreator.

This harsh technical insanity is balanced quite nicely with semi-atmospheric, darkthrone-worship chord-progressions which sound very nice and manage to complete the whole tapestry encompasing this entire album. The bass isn't audable that much, however, there are some moments when it becomes easy to deduce that beneath the wall-of-noise created by the vocals and guitars together, there is actually a real bass keeping some sort of rhythm to this insane cacophany. The drums are programmed, and can get extremely annoying at times, especially when the sound of the hi-hat and the bass-drum become over-eccentuated.

The vocals provide this album with an additional layer of pure chaos. The tone of the vocals sound sincere, harsh, tormented and frankly quite unsettling. When the music turns from burzum-worship, to marduk/infernal-war inspired bellicose metal, the vocals really get a unique and prominent possibility to expose their rather multi-faceted nature.All in all, this is quite an impressive, if not much over-whelming release, which will fit right up the ally of anyone who is remotely interested in international underground black metal

Baltak makes horribly horribly noisy black metal. The music has been described as DarkThrone worship (so you know the kind of basic and cold riffs), but with vocals over them that are screeched and then run through an echo-chamber several times apparently. The music blasts on song after song, and I'm wondering if they're using only a drumcomputer or if some parts and some of the fills are done with live drums.

The songs are mostly indistinguishable from eachother (unless someone can actually discern the Macedonian lyrics) but somehow I like this. It's a bit weird I guess, but I'm glad I bought this at bargain price. It's not a black metal masterpiece, but this is the loudest cd I got in my collection (ignoring the Stalaggh cd, as that fits in a different category), and I like to listen to it for variety's sake. The screeches, the unrelenting drumcomputer, the insane guitarsoundscape, it's all so deliciously raw and loud. If someone asks me what kind of music I like to listen to, and I want to shock them, I show them Baltak. But only then..