ALBUM REVIEW: Fane – Ante-Inferno

Hailing from Scarborough, perhaps the last place in the UK where you’re likely to look to find extreme metal bands, ANTE-INFERNO features some of the more prolific musicians in Yorkshire’s impressive black metal underground within its ranks. With their A Dream of the Devil demo in 2017, they established a great sound, which was in equal parts vicious and grandiose, laying some fairly strong foundations on which to build their sound. Their debut album, Fane, develops this sound even further, making for one an impressive and memorable record.

After the short, but deeply atmospheric title track provides a great intro for Fane, the album proper begins with Oath, a song that blends razor sharp, powerful guitar hooks and thunderous drumming with acerbic vocals that add a hellish quality to the music. It’s an epic piece of music with a harsh undercurrent, that jumps seamlessly between fast and feral moments and much slower, more doom-laden ones, setting a great benchmark for the rest of Fane.

Passing proves to be a much more intense affair, with thicker guitars, more ferocious vocals and a tight, intricate drum beat that all combine to make a vast wall of noise with some discordant melodies peppered throughout. It’s a dark, brooding offering that excellently mixes the more aggressive and catchy sides of ANTE-INFERNO together, resulting in a memorable, yet fierce, track. Return is, if anything, the most visceral and rabid number on the whole album. Taking the framework of the previous track and doubling down on the more monstrous elements in the sound, this is, at points, a whirlwind of cacophonous black metal with great guitar hooks, bellicose vocals and energetic, frenzied drumming making for a dizzying, unflinchingly driven song. Absence, a short but incredibly effective piece of music, sees ANTE-INFERNO begin to make use of cleaner guitar tones and a hazy, sublime ambience in order to craft a brief, yet brilliant, instrumental interlude that breaks Fane up quite well and adds another layer to the bands already eclectic sound.

Worship returns to more familiar territory, with soaring lead guitar flourishes and caustic vocals carrying the music at many points. Shifting from focused, speed-driven sections to more measured, riff saturated ones with ease, this is one of Fane‘s more impressive moments, bringing in a few haunting, hypnotic parts towards its closing minutes, making for a diverse and immersive song overall. Fragments brings the album to its conclusion with a heady, engrossing slab of atmospheric black metal that ties together the bands more savage and chaotic side with an enthralling, grandiose one that makes this track sound absolutely monolithic. It features some of the most impressive vocals on the whole album, and a fair amount of its more catchy guitar hooks, making this final, lengthy song a great way to end the album, leaving the listener eager to hear more.

ANTE-INFERNO manage to get the mix between the harsher and more ethereal sides of their sound right, meaning that there’s plenty on offer across Fane regardless of what kind of black metal you prefer, and the production is just about raw enough to give it a fierce and visceral sound, whilst not dampening the powerful, immersive parts that are there. ANTE-INFERNO have clearly perfected their own sound, setting a lofty bar for their future music to surpass.

Rating: 8/10

Fane is out now via UKEM Records. 

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