De Magia Veterum: Migdal Bavel

Imagine yourself being stuck in a jam packed elevator, stopping all of a sudden as the power turns off. Then, the cables break, letting the car drop to the ground. Everybody screams their lungs out, scratching and desperately trying to escape the fatality. Before you know it, the ultimate crash occurs in a hellish sound. To make matters worse, you are the only survivor, but you can't move at all since all your bones are broken. The only thing you can do is exploring visually the nightmarish sight of crushed humans and smell a mixture of burning metal and flesh…That's basically the first impression I got from listening this one-man project called De Magia Veterum.

It is pretty hard to figure out what's going on at the beginning and decipher through this noisily insane sound-scape. The melodious rate is minimalist, and the emphasis is towards the intense, somewhat cinematic edge of the Black Metal arts. Fat paces, tremolo pickings, discrete (buried in the mix) rasps, are the elements to be heard throughout this 37 minutes album. Moderate tempos, intriguing time signatures, ambient passages, as well as frequent keyboard passages with atmospheric or psychedelic tones could be deciphered amongst the noisy and adventurous scenery. It takes some times to get use to this music. Once you consider this very peculiar take on the Black Metal for what it is, you can actually start to digest it better, and enjoy the nuances involve.

Not an easy listen by any means, although quite a few tracks are interesting. My favorites compositions are; "Curse of Cannan" and "Rapture".

Track listing:
1 - The Confusion of Tongues
2 - Migdal Bavel
3 - The Boat of Uta-Naphistim
4 - Interlude I: The Ruins of Copan
5 - Curse of Cannan
6 - Zaota
7 - I Am the Vine
8 - Interlude II: Evocation of the Gallu
9 - Below the Altar of Ra-Hoor-Khuit
10 - Rapture

Added: October 15th 2009
Reviewer: Denis Brunelle
Score:
Related Link: Band's MySpace Page
Hits: 2000
Language: english

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