[Reviewed by: Iaha Crax]
Past times are recollected by musical or literary visions into eerie memories that blend together the forms of reality and dream. The “Prelude” of the record juxtaposes to daily wanderings a sepulchral spectrum shaped from the remembrance of an immemorial past.
With blasting icy whippings of ferocious black metal, Blut Aus Nord begin their evocations fed upon the Memoria Vetusta. Like a precipitated blossoming, the factual structures of the metallic arpeggios explode in a mesmerizing portrayal of an inner faith. “Paien”, a song shifting from rebellious to reclusive emotions, swiftly forces the listener into a poetic reverie.
Blut Aus Nord goes back into the history of the genre and captures the thrilling albeit demonic melody of Dawn or Odium, eventually adorning the textures with their convoluted and arabesque execution. In this manner, “Tellus Mater” sweeps on precious and flamboyant accords, plating riffs of a picturesque charm that conjure up their French ancestry from Hirilorn.
“Forhist” sprouts up in a brilliant tapestry of the royally kindled black metal and escalates up to a poignancy of enrapturing, visible presence. This mostly uncommon lightness in swifting from churning passages to a vibrant, fleshy melody elicits a hallucinating, cinematic participation from the listener. The corvus register of Vlad’s singing together with sporadic choral flashes embellish the song with an erratic effect. “Forhist”, considered from a technical point of view, could set new standards for a potential new post-pagan metal movement.
The hunger that Blut Aus Nord has for gathering in one majestic tableau too many splendid musical or visual elements may sometimes sound redundant. But what inhuman frankness do they display in doing so on this next track, “Henosis”. This bombastic plethora of sounds, reaching black metal parnassianism, is nothing but simply stunning – and is reminiscent of a certain ambiguity we may have regarding a similar display of such music on Kataxu’s “Hunger of Elements”.
“Metaphor Of The Moon” takes its structure gem from a harshly bitting riff à la Dark Space. You will find in this somber, scintillating, impressionist landscape a happiness of soul so enthralling to the black metal sensationist, that the urge to listen to the track again will possess you for a long time.
Their musical writing has affinities with surrealist painting techniques: the image is photographic and the assembling, albeit nightmarish, depicts a stinging, unconscious imagery. Blut Aus Nord approach to metal music a luxury with a diamond’s consistency, which has the sense of lacking measure and yet is still guided by a genuine mastery and metal dominance. The last song, “Clarissima Mundi Lumina”, takes this ever characteristic excess in technique and synesthesia and transforms it in an engulfing musical experience. A sacred music for celebration, sovereigns and gods dancing in a tumultuous movement that always summons an explosion: Lumina in excelsis.
“Saturnian Poetry” finds an alliance between dream poetry and musical excess that will make you intimate with spheres only such music could bring back from our collective memory.
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost. – Proust
Blut Aus Nord – Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry
Debemur Morti Productions, DMP0115-07
CD 2014
Santa Sangre 