ALBUM REVIEW: Halls Of Salvation – Eclesios
Rallying under the stygian banner of Eisenwald Records and hailing from the dark heart of Thuringia, comes the debut album from a new project known as ECLESIOS. Comprised of musicians from renowned black metal acts MOSAIC, INFAUST and WOLFHETAN, their debut, titled Halls Of Salvation, already has an awful lot to live up to.
The mood of the opener and title track Halls Of Salvation is set with Gregorian chanting and smoky, cloying atmosphere before boisterous slugs of murky chords come thudding into focus, giving the whole feel of a stoned AUTOPSY, or a stimulated HOODED MENACE, whichever the reader would prefer. The vocals are not what you may expect straight off the bat, sounding like a call and response between both styles preferred by one Alexander Von Meilenwald. Those being, of course, deep and throaty howls and something that could be described as singing. Towards the back half of the track, things kick into high gear with a blastbeat that betrays the pitch-black backstories of the three members.
A dolorous bell then sounds in the abyss. What follows it is a lurching mid-paced riff that stomps around menacingly, announcing the arrival of the band’s self-titled mission statement, Eclesios. This is until the throttle is grasped and jammed firmly open. If one thing can be said for the fast segments offered up by ECLESIOS, it is that while they might not be the most technically proficient or aesthetically pleasing, they are undeniably tremendous fun.
N.O.S. provides a barrel-chested, pit bait vortex that races through blastbeats and riffs at an alarming rate, ringing every morsel of worth from them and discarding them like spent shell casings. It’s fast, dirty and uncompromising, leaving the listener’s head well-and-truly battered after its relentless eight-minute runtime is up. In an example of something that you could argue in court is ‘respite’, Death Chiming mainly deals in menacing chug throughout its runtime. You can almost see the comedically evil-looking grinding machine yawning open before you as it crunches the bones of those who were kicked in earlier, with the sound of constant double kicks, sludgy power chords and rasping barks offering no solace.
Nuclear Vulva is something of a weak spot. As the closer of an album like this and with such a garish title, it wouldn’t have been too outrageous to expect something more akin to an ARCHGOAT track, one that essentially bludgeons the listener into submission with outright pace and sheer aggression. Unfortunately, that’s not what we get. What we do get is something of a mid-paced plodder that becomes somewhat forgettable after the meat of the rest of the album, meaning that Halls Of Salvation disappointingly goes out with more of a whimper than a bang.
The term ‘blackened death metal’ gets bandied about a lot these days, with it often tied to tryhard, edglelord, talent show host nonsense like latter-days BEHEMOTH. What can be found on Halls Of Salvation then, is an instruction manual on how to handle this particular melding of genres properly. It feels like a love letter to both gnarly old-school death metal and harsh, unwelcoming black metal. It is not overwhelmingly original, it is not enormously produced and it is not even particularly highly polished, but it is undeniably a no-frills labour of love – an exercise in cherry picking beloved elements from arguably the two best subgenres, jamming them into a woodchipper and smearing the resultant slurry into the listener’s ear holes. If that sounds like a good time to you, you’ve found one for your end-of-year list.
Rating: 8/10
Halls Of Salvation is out now via Eisenwald.
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