Spheres Below – Goatcraft
By Flork!
photo: Goatcraft official Facebook page (Kosak Photo)
Perhaps the hardest part of being a human is cutting through the layers of crap and finding a personality in someone. I mean, even deep, deep down somewhere in the most hardened of criminals, or criminally insane, or just purely insane (for the rest of us who are currently not, or have yet to be institutionalized) you can always find a person buried under a heavily-fortified defense system. And often, or perhaps most of the time, the hurt and pain we accumulate over the years traps us beneath all those walls and barriers, and the suffocation and suffering we feel is like being trapped alive 20 feet underground in a concrete coffin. And yet, for some unknown or inexplicable reason, inside this paralysis and eternal nightmare we can’t wake-up from, we feel the safest. So, when I heard Spheres Below by Goatcraft for the first time, I knew there would be some digging involved.
I say this because the album, in fact, took several years to reach the surface. According to their info on bandcamp.com, all of the tracks and lyrics were written between 2011 and 2017, with the album itself being recorded in 2017 and eventually released at the end of 2020. Yes, there have been demos and certainly loads of concerts in that time, their last show before the pandemic being in Pisek, the Czech Republic, but who knows why it took so long to come out, perhaps they are just perfectionists.
I admit that I needed some help when I wrote this review. Why you may ask? Because I didn’t like Spheres Below at first, maybe giving it a “not great, not terrible” opinion at best, but later, after listening to it a few times, it started to grow on me. The only review I could find for this album was on the Czech Webzine/Database of Hard and Heavy Music – Hard Music Base. For the purpose of keeping the review in English, here is the Google translation of the first part of the review:
The last devotees to the honest, blacksmith craft are slowly disappearing into the abyss of time. Rough, well-done work is replaced by machine-controlled, belt production. Surviving, lifelong defenders of the black cult often stand at a crossroads today. Some are lured by the tinsel of money and fame, others go back, others remain standing still, others travel without the possibility of returning to an unknown place, and others show an attempt at invention by repainting black on white. You can only frighten an old grandmother or a bitter virgin with Beelzebub. You will be happy to mate with the joint in papule and a bottle in hand for the already millionth clone Mayhem, but you are not looking for a deeper meaning in that. You patiently listen to the philosophical agitation, urging you to wake up, until you get a taste for a booze of liquor or a perverted fuck with a naughty bitch. All patience to listen bursts at the moment of finding out that they the mudrlants themselves do not know what they really want, and their wisdom is a mere attempt to make a significant difference from others.
The last line (mudrlant is the Czech word for an intellect or philosopher) supports what I just wrote above. Loads of bands get to a point of no return where they either give in to the industry, in turn becoming its slaves, or give up completely and go home. Those that do give in get so lost they become ghosts of their former selves. Yet Goatcraft is hardly at that point yet, in fact their label, In League with Satan Productions has no bands signed to it and is likely their own label. Although Spheres Below can’t be compared to previous releases theoretically, it can be compared to other bands as the author continues:
Bratislava's GOATCRAFT turned from that crossroads on a more sympathetic path that will eventually take you back to hell.
Well, let’s say I’m not too sure about that. True, there is no bling nor tinsel or money and fame, that is correct. But Goatcraft is a typical black metal group, with loads of similarities to Mayhem, since all black metal are descendants of them. This is what I mean about getting past all the layers and finding a personality. But I guess that’s the point, this is what black metal is all about and deviating from true and trusted formulae would only lead you astray from the style. After all, the genre was born due to a build-up of layers of defense. There is simply no room for deviant experimentation and you cannot adapt this form of music to other audiences, otherwise you would be burned alive at the stake.
Spheres Below is a mixture of long and short tracks, 11 of them in total, some of it extremely good like The Obsidian Halls and especially Kolossal Katastrophic Kollapse, Putrid Stench of Existence or Horrendous Light, while other tracks are bit repetitive at times (The Beast of Hell), and the less-than-a-minute tracks are only filler between the longer ones. The drumming is solid, for sure, and the production above-average, although the transition between the first two tracks was done a bit poorly, with a split-second break heard between the two (I would have kept it all as one entire track). Otherwise, whoever mastered and mixed this album did a great job.
I think this album will satisfy Goatcrafts’s followers anyways (the band does have a considerable following considering the small size of the market in Slovakia) and Spheres Below does have a good chance at attracting new fans from abroad. Goatcraft plays their instruments well and considering how long it took to realise this album, Spheres Below gets an A+ for hard work, as well as adapting their live sound to the studio.
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