I arrived at my first experience of Italian underground black metal activists Tenebrae in Perpetuum by default. I offered this to another writer who I remembered liking them and was correct, unfortunately in the time that it took this to arrive they had already put hand into pocket and bought it, I took this as a seal of approval and pressed the play button with a fair amount of anticipation. Quite a lot of listens later the music has sort of set in and I finally feel at grips with it enough to write a review. There is very little to be found about the group on the Internet and they truly adhere to underground strictures with little in the way of promotion; there is no official website or MySpace page to be found for them.
This is the group’s third album and they are not really a band who look like they rush releases as these have come out in three year gaps, bridged by a couple of splits with the likes of Horna. The band are a trio with vocalist Ildanach also of Absentia Lunae only joining in 2009, the other pair of musicians also serve time in Beatrik. Vocals are in Italian and the music is fantastically charged, black satanic orthodox art. You are immediately thrown into a maelstrom as opener ‘Percepire La Luce Attraverso Il Sepolcro’ opens the tomb door and rabidly charges in. The guitar signatures and riffing are excellent here, flailing with a tumultuous and overriding melody that hones in like a garrotte. Vocals are full of blood lust and have an unhinged beastly flow about them, there is little here that the serious black metal aesthete could fail to like here. As the track drops it offers another surprise in the form of chanted ‘plainsong’ vocals sounding as though they have come out of a divine black mass, I am assuming that this is evoked in Latin and it adds to everything else with atmospheric finesse.
There are eight sermons on the album and it runs at a scant 38 minutes long making it just the right length to force you to give it many a repeated spins. The guitar sound is ever twisting and really rushes around the fast-flowing, driven songs; it is probably them and the great vocal performance that really sells this one to me. The mournful moments that take this into a devotional status are not overused and every time I encounter them it is as though I am being drenched into some sort of arcane mystery within the music. In a way it is all quite unique, it would be all too easy to throw in mention of other bands here and there but superfluous for the sake of review, as I feel is a track by track dissection.
Simply put this is well worth tracking down even if the group do not make it particularly easy to do so; you can always find them at the home of our favourite plague dealer below.
http://www.debemur-morti.com/default.php
