Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Glorior Belli - the Great Southern Darkness

And to think i was surprised when i found out Gojira was from France. Glorior Belli, not only stands apart from their peers in the already diverse French Black metal scene , but sounds like drug addicts New Orleans rather than rolling out from the suburbs of Paris.
Their newest release finds them treading a similar path they followed on the 09 album " meet us at the southern sign. Upon my first couple of listens to this one i have to say it sounds darker to me, than the previous effort, they have dabbled further in the blues and sound more authentic at doing in than most american sludge bands. For the most part raw mid-tempo black metal , like an Acid Bath influenced version of Watain , this comparison is further drawn when the occasional clean vocals come in which invoke Dax Riggs from the Pagan Terrorist tactics days .
The guitar comes across dirty dark and creepy as black metal should , the dirty element never comes from lack of production, every thing sounds right in place, this is not under produced for the sake of being kvlt.
As i normally bring up the fact i listen to most albums in chunks on my ipod shuffle mode, to sit and digest this one today was a treat, the album was an easy listen, the next thing i new when i put it on i was four songs into. I am sure some one will want to label them the next Watain, i am not going to do that ,Watain has a dirty sound but it is dirty like the worms in the stage carcasses , where as Glorior Belli would be a good replacement for SLEEP if a sequel to Gummo is ever made . By all means smoke 'em if you got 'em to this while spray painting a pentagram on the back of the double wide.