Welcome back to Bandcamp Buried Treasure! We here at Metal Injection have been celebrating Black Metal History Month all throughout the month of February, but I haven't really had any good black metal to offer you. Which sucks! Fortunately you can break out the corpse paint and robes this week, because we're about to get all types of blackened up in here. You know the rules of the article by now:
- I hunt down awesome artists on Bandcamp that have their album up for Buy It Now/Free Download and give them a write up. I'm not explicitly telling you to download the album for free since I'm a big supporter of buying your music, but I like the option for my readership to be there.
- The goal is to introduce you to smaller bands or obscure side-projects you might not have heard of. Anything to expand your musical horizons by just a little bit each week!
- And of course, for there to be a conversation about similar bands or bands you think I should be covering. I check the comments section!
Like I've been saying, I switched the format up a bit with two new sections, titled "The Basic Idea" and "Why I Love It." The former is a short news-style lead that paints a vivid picture of what you're about to hear to get you interested and help you understand a little why I chose the record, while the latter serves simply as a review piece.
Here comes Worsen!
The Basic Idea
Worsen's Blood is black metal without all the stereotypical lo-fi sounds that come along with the genre. Blood stands inches away from your face with sunken eyes, torch in hand and disintegrates your soul with it's bleak, cold gaze.
Why I Love It
Like I said above, I'm not exactly the biggest black metal guy in existence. I hate a lot of the intentional lo-fi sounding recordings because they just sound contrived, like the artists only did it because they think it's supposed to be like that. Except that sound was born because Bathory was too poor at the time to afford good production so the self-titled sounded the way it did and a genre was born. Great. That came out in 1984 and 30 years later we're still aping that idea… evolution, anyone? Just because you're taking a different approach to a genre doesn't mean it's not that genre anymore.
That diatribe is exactly why I'm loving Blood– there's no super distant vocals that are "evoking the horror forest spirits of the ancient cold moon winter" or whatever the fuck poetic garbage I'm being presented with. Blood is a black metal record that stands up and says "look at this, this is heavy and good and evil and you're going to love it." Blood isn't trying to hide out in the shadows and be mysteriously evil behind a wall of reverb and thin guitars- Blood is meant to be up in your face scaring the hell out of you and letting you know there's no way out of this hell you've gotten yourself into.
The other thing I love about Blood is that it can't really be defined as anything else other than black metal. While the production might sound like it's in the realm of blackened death metal ala mid-2000s Behemoth, the music isn't really that. If there's a comparison that can be drawn it's that Blood, and Worsen in general as the sound they seem like they're trying to achieve, sound like an earlier Dark Funeral in their The Secrets of the Black Arts days… and that's fucking awesome.
