Hello and welcome back to the Bandcamp Buried Treasure article series, where I'll be hunting down Buy It Now/Free Download-payment option albums on Bandcamp by the best bands you've never heard! 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, all while keeping your cost (potentially) down! This week we'll be listening to Los Angeles-based black metal project Averse Concept!
From the first few notes of "Grey Skies" I'm sure it's perfectly clear that Averse Concept aren't striving to be all "trve kvlt frozen northmoonforest" and whatever due to a pretty distinct lack of reverb. The piece comes and goes like a ghost solemnly drifting along a dead landscape, only to bring on… the black metal! Yet not really the black metal you might be expecting. The music, and production specifically, noticeable on the second track "Welcome to the Trance" is much more natural and in-your-face than the ghastly, foggy traditional black metal so popularized by bands like Bathory and Xasthur. If most post-rock grew a serious pair of balls, threw on some corpse paint and started listening to stuff like All Pigs Must Die and Trap Them, it would be Averse Concept. Classifiably it's black metal- the vocals fit, the music's feel fits, the lyrics fit, everything fits. As an experience it's a lot different.
Track three, "Resigned Devotion," follows fairly closely in the footsteps of "Welcome to the Trance," but picks the tempo up a little bit and relies on a more diversified spread of chords and riffs to carry throughout the song with plenty of speedy licks interspersed. The vocals are also much lower than "Welcome to the Trance" and fits the mood perfectly. Are we still in the realm of black metal? See the last part of that first paragraph. The same can be said about the closer "Clouded Recovery."
"Desolate Alleviate" might just be my favorite on the record because it switches it up between black metal and a really, genuinely interesting style of technical hardcore music that feels so raw and angry just as much as it does bleak and well… black metal-ey. As many darkened corridors as the song might lead you down, you know you're in the same building- there's nothing jarring that makes the song feel weird or out of place.
Averse Concept are the up-and-coming black metal band I've wanted to hear for a while now- a band with all the hallmarks of a black metal group without all the frilly reverb and "look-how-evil-I-am." Averse Concept are no bullshit.
