Black Curse – Burning In Celestial Poison
Release Date: 25th October 2024
Label: Sepulchral Voice Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Blackened Death Metal, War Metal, Black Metal, Extreme Metal.
FFO: Spectral Voice, Antichrist Siege Machine, Black Fucking Cancer, Concrete Winds.
Review By: Rick Farley
A blackened long fingered, pointed nail hand reaches from behind you, slithering around your neck, pressing down on your throat until you start to see darkness in the distance. The nauseating stench of its flesh is putrid as you drift into unconsciousness. Once you sluggishly begin to regain cognizance, you become aware your withered body is forcibly being dragged across the dry, gritty earth, the combusting trees swiftly passing by your view. Spots of crusted fluid and open wounds appear deepened in colour underneath the diminishing light. Dirt and smoky grime gather on your blood moistened flesh, it all feels so grim. Your acceptance that you’re close to death numbs the surface pain but burns your psyche to anguished levels of fear. Utterly suffocated, delirium sets in, and staggering levels of horror are birthed. Burning in Celestial Poison sounds like this. An equal abomination of black metal and death metal set at a warring pace, built from malice and aggression. Nastiness in its rawest musical form somehow defines life’s true evils. It makes my skin crawl.
Black Curse, originally formed in Denver in 2015, combines two extreme genres into one hellish war metal atmosphere with spacious brutality. Pure fucking black grisliness with a penchant for annihilation. The barrage of blast beats, sludgy distortion, hateful menace, and sanguinary aggression is a caustic union that I can never get enough of. On the surface this may sound like noisy savagery, but I assure you if you spend even the slightest bit of time past one earful you will succumb to its ruinous beauty and embrace its wickedness.
Black Curse consisting of members from Blood Incantation, Spectral Voice, Khemmis and Primitive Man make them a bit of an underground supergroup. The band unleashed their debut album Endless Wound in 2020 to critical acclaim, ensuring their follow-up had to be equally prodigious.
Burning in Celestial Poison being released by Sepulchral Voice Records lives up to its predecessor by being just as ugly and inhuman but presented in a slightly different manner. Black Curse focuses more on dilapidating atmosphere than the almighty crunchy riff. The dense black metal and death metal are closer to being on even ground, where along with the crust filled riff chunkiness lies a vast, ghastly dissonance that’s more disorienting. Searing guitars burn intensely as the wall of sound consumes you. The extremity seems turned up a notch, it’s faster, murkier, and surely more sinister. The biggest difference is this album wants to shred your flesh as quickly as possible, while Endless Wound was more geared to bludgeon it. Either way, the end result is still the same.
A grimy, mysterious sounding guitar chord rings out into space on opening track Spleen Girt with Serpent before going into what is best described as a full on black metal assault. Insane blasting, sawing guitars and tortured reverb soaked screeches, result in anxiety ridden chaos for the first three minutes of the eleven-minute track. A minor respite provides the listener with a groovier riff that leads us into doomier territory, no less vicious but deliberately slower paced. The droning atmosphere remains horrifying, with pained screams and trebly guitar noise in the background behind chords/drums resonating in bursts of single strikes that repeatedly bash you. The fast onslaught begins again, ensuring that war metal is upon us, and we must prepare for even more sonic hostility. Bestial, devouring, and laden with hatred.
Burning in Celestial Poison was produced by Artur Rizk. The extraordinarily dense nature of the music comes across like it was created from dark magick. Its soundscape engulfs everything while remaining airy, mysterious yet agonizingly brutal. Truly an accomplishment to have a record like this sound so organically pleasing while being completely chaos filled and noisy.
Black Curse is surely not a band for everyone, this is dreadfully submersive and delightfully far underground. However, if war metal or nauseating blackened death metal is your thing, this is top tier. A true masterpiece of vile atmosphere and malignance.
(4.5 / 5)
