It means 'pain' in Orcish if you're wondering. The name. We're in one man black metal band territory here, this time from Spain and of the aggressive old school species rather than some existential angst but the name still fits. Nice and harsh.
The EP Inferno comes at us in five compact parts and a little under half an hour of old school malignance. This isn't Darkthrone in tin box stuff though, being a decent enough sound for the hollow edge to the rasped vocals to be an active and quite effective choice. Drums are clear and with a full sound and the riffs prowl with a dark but occasionally melodic edge to the buzz. Rather than a blazing firestorm, though, it has that ponderous weight to it, a heavy and shadowed feel that brings to mind not just the catacombs but the passage and fading of time. I suppose that usually implies a touch of the melancholy, but really this piece as a whole has more of an imperious gaze to it, an aggression with little give.
Maybe it's the Spanish sun but there is often a heat to the sound here; not a warmth but an arid heat as opposed to the damp ice of the Scandanavians, particularly on the final part, ' Conqueror of this Wooden Abyss' where an acoustic beginning with monastic chants breaks out into a great battle riff which weirdly reminds me of early Gehenna for little logical reason. Rather excellent stuff showing how far you can vary the spirit even within such self imposed borders.
Perhaps a little too often Inferno slips into the easy language of the classic Norwegian chainsaw riff that you've heard hundreds of times before, edging particularly to the Darkthrone side of things. Like on the opening riff of the first song ' The Awakening'. At times this can be a comforting familiarity, at others a little distracting as your mind tries to place the sound of those echoes.
Still, as Hrizg has no intention of straying from the old path because that is the path he wishes to walk, the criticism is fairly redundant. This is good old school black metal the way it has always been played with a puritanical gleam in its eye and enough of an individual breath in it's dark soul to be worthwhile listening to if you still have room for the traditional.
http://www.myspace.com/hrizg
Gizmo
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