Looking back over their past releases, Czech BM band Sator Marte evidently have something of a fascination with fascist German military imagery, employing artwork near identical to that of ‘Panzer Division Marduk’ for their 2007 EP and flirting openly with NSBM aesthetics on their subsequent 2008 full-length by superimposing a monochrome image of the band’s corpsepainted singer over a shot of the Nuremburg Rally. Whilst the band have appeared alongside an openly NS Pagan Front band in a recent four-way split, in the press release for latest album ‘Za Zdmi’ (Behind the Walls) they appear keen to distance themselves from the NSBM crowd by stressing a strictly apolitical stance however, and have also dropped the panzerfausts-and-bulletbelts fetishism in favour of a stark, minimalist band-logo-only cover instead. The main thing that distances Za Zdmi from the output of the vast majority of ideologically dubious BM bands out there however is the fact that musically-speaking it’s really rather good.
The album is a complex and obtuse listen, successfully melding together a variety of underground influences, with the coarse and dirty mid-paced nihilistic grinding of Antaeus rubbing shoulders with passages of all out melodic blasting in the early Marduk vein, and with occasional hints of grimy, plodding doom and freezing and depressive shoegaze thrown in for good measure. A good example of this mix is cracking opener ‘Remeslo Valky’ which flits between clattering blastbeats and high-octane tremolo-riffing, filthy grooves tinged with relentlessly bleak melodies and the trudging and dystopian eclecticism of Blut-Aus-Nordophiles Reverence, the latter deconstructing the song beautifully with its despondent, lumbering momentum.
Indeed, keen use of momentum plays an important role in the songs on Za Zdmi, with myriad changes in tempo throughout each song, chaotic riffs erupting forth in sporadic bursts, the charge then being diverted by haltering, DSBM-tinged, mid-paced passages before plunging back in with either a breakneck, downwardly spiralling melody or another filthy and mutated punk riff. ‘Elitzy’ follows this formula by ploughing through passages of meandering dissonance and strangled melodic riffing in-between galloping up-tempo sections that bristle with energy and positively command you to bang your head, whilst the chaotic riffing of ‘Koroze’ is underpinned by a lumbering, stop-start bridge that slowly staggers to a crawl at the song’s conclusion, like someone struggling forward deliriously whilst quickly losing vast quantities of blood. Elsewhere the album has a more bombastic feel, merging the aforementioned cold, crude grooves with the relative bounciness of Behexen and various instances of decrepit, whirlwind riffing that amount to pure Mutiilation worship, whilst the Dissection-indebted coldness and labyrinthine riffs of ‘Casus Luciferi’-era Watain are also clearly discernable throughout.
The album has something of a habit of hitting you over the head with myriad outside influences continually throughout its duration, but these are put together in such a gratifying way that it still manages to sound fresh, and the album’s atmosphere is absolutely spot on, with a production that gets the balance between rawness and power just right. Despite its penchant for angular melodic riffing and for constantly flying off on tangents, the album is built upon a backbone of simple, stripped-down, chaotic- and-crunchy riffs to which the songs always return, hammering them home repeatedly with the aid of some satisfyingly simple and thudding mid-paced drumming. As with Antaeus, the songs frequently degenerate into what feel like incantations, the primitive grooves counterpointed by similarly coarse mid-ranged rasped vocals, and whilst these don’t vary a great deal throughout the album, they are convincingly done and sit nicely in the mix, adding to the atmosphere and accentuating the rousing and anthemic parts in particular whilst drawing attention towards rather than away from the riffs themselves. Za Zdmi is hardly anything groundbreaking, but it gets the balance between its different musical elements just right, remaining wholly engaging throughout and not outstaying its welcome with a runtime of just over 36 minutes. If caustic, depressive melody and grimy, crushing mid-paced grooves are what you look for in your black metal, then you could do a lot worse than this.
http://www.myspace.com/satormarte
