Armanenschaft ‎– Psychedelic Winter

Armanenschaft comes from Finland. This is their first LP (2008) which was released after their 'Hag All All Hag' Demo. 'Psychedelic Winter' as a title of a black metal LP? Well... that is weird, I thought. I was very curious to listen and finally, some days later, the LP had arrived. Party time I thought and prepared for the holocaust! Nothing could tell what would follow...

From the first second of this release one thing is more than obvious: the raw sound! Forget what you may think about raw, Armanenschaft is the definition of this term! Monolithic, primitive and minimal black metal, played with punk simplicity, either fast or mid-tempo. Pure noise, some faint funeral doom elements, black metal for sure and even punk. A handful of very primitive, paranoid and repeating riffs, along with some horrific and crazy screams (aka vocals), plus a production as rotten as a piece of meat left under the sun for days! I'm not sure if they actually know how to play their instruments, I don't know if they recorded this LP in a cave but these questions are not important, believe me!

OK, this isn't 100% music or furthermore metal, but all the grimness and atmosphere remains. No, this is not 'traditional' stuff, to some of you will be like torture to even listen for more than 5 minutes. The most outrageous paranoia dressed with a very noisy yet very clear black metal veil. Imagine a much rotten version of Equimanthorn (US) combined with the madness of Emit and Vrolok and saturated with some dark ambient elements as well as other elements found in projects once belonged to the mighty Legiones Noires. In fact they have a lot of LLN aesthetics to their sound.

'Psychedelic Winter' is loud, hell yeah! This is noise, and even more, this is true black metal, even though it's more black than metal! I like very much this kind of stuff, as I like B movies, as I like trash aesthetics in general. I like this kind of sonic pollution. I hope that you will too. Don't expect anything but black metal noise paranoia. If you are after 'real music' with 'real' production avoid them like plague. It could be like a bad joke but it isn't. You either like them or hate them, there is no middle path. No, it is not music, it's rather a collection of brutal guitar malfunctions, endless pounding drums, manic screams and the whole atmosphere of an asylum; and finally YES, it deserves the title 'Psychedelic Winter'. It has everything to deserve this title, so cold, so fucked up, so weird, so disgusting, so non-music, so trash, so rotten and yet so bloody beautiful...

5/5

(I wrote this review for Metal Archives, August 27th, 2008)