Written by Baazgor Friday, 22 May 2009 18:17
 | Archgoat - The Light-Devouring Darkness Tracklisting- 1 - Intro: 3rd Invocation |
‘The Light-Devouring Darkness’ is the second full length album release from Finland’s Archgoat in their twenty year career. Even after this substantial length of time, Archgoat manage to retain a character to their music that embodies the old school. With a sound that is musically similar to acts such as Black Witchery and Blasphemy and executed with a style very much in the vein of national contemporaries such as Horna, Satanic Warmaster and Beherit, ‘The Light-Devouring Darkness’ is a slab of mid-tempo, raw black metal that is well worth giving a listen to.
On this new release, the Finnish trio sticks to the very basic elements. There are no major dynamics here, no keyboards, no guitar solos, no studio polishing, not even a major lead, this is a no bullshit, straight forward album that is quick, loud and mean. Most of the songs here are composed of very basic riffs consisting of a handful of simple tremolo-picked chords and a few single note sequences, backed by thrashy drums and some sick, distorted guttural vocal work. This type of minimalism is like a person who loses one of his major senses. You resort to other things to find you way through, and with ‘The Light-Devouring Darkness’, you look at the other minor elements more closely due to this minimalism. For example, the whole of the music is heightened by its production properties, which allows the drums to clearly pound away while the guitars and bass fill in the cracks behind it with a warm and fuzzy distortion that centralizes into a small sphere of sound that is perfect for this release. The vocals fit each song perfectly and deviate little from their low, choking delivery. With all of this taken into consideration, all of the little, random elements that go into each idea or facet within Archgoat’s newest release sound exactly how they should and are placed exactly where they should be.
While this type of minimalism can be viewed as repetition, ‘The Light-Devouring Darkness’ is a structure of ten songs that combine to be only twenty nine minutes of music, therefore, most songs rarely exceed three or three and a half minutes, allowing the listener to enjoy the substance of the material without losing focus or interest due to excessive carrying on.
From the primal power of ‘Apotheosis of Lucifer’ and the whiplash inducing thrash of ‘Blessed in Beast’s Blood’ all the way to the closer ‘The Dawn of the Antichrist’, ‘The Light-Devouring Darkness’, from conception to release, delivers it’s brooding intent with little deviating and discriminating and mindlessly crushes and ruins anything it’s in line from point A to point B. If you’re into old school black metal, give this a run, you’ll enjoy it for sure.
Final Score: 7.5/10
Written by Baazgor (Andrew Krause) for Metaltome.com, May 15th, 2009
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