Richtfeuer

Rană

Anarchist Blackened Crust gets the shoegaze treatment on what I consider to be 2023's heaviest album.

Official Description

Four tracks of raging black metal punctuated with elements of blackened crust, chanted atmospheres, and mournfully oppressive doom, laced with melancholic guitar themes and vocal desperation.

My Thoughts

This is, hands down, the heaviest album I heard in 2023. What do I say about it? It is a really successful exercise in genre-melding. What do you get when that weird strain of the really aggressive end of atmospheric black metal gets wedded to the crunchier, grindier end of neocrust? Necrocrust? PostCrust? It seems unfair to call it your run of the mill blackened crust, when it’s a more crusty black metal. I’m just going to call it crusty black metal and roll with it.

On to the actual content. As the lyrics to Flamura state “raise the hand against the shepherd”. And that is what this album is, an exhortation to violence. Cleansing, revolutionary violence; “raising the banner of retribution so our wounds might be mended”. This is an album of raw rage channeled into savage sonic aggression. Unfurl your black flag and sharpen your swords comrades. Our time is coming soon.

For Fans of

• Year of No Light
• Downfall of Gaia
• Wretched of the Earth
• Dödsrit

I quote from Andrea Muehlebach’s 2016 essay Time of Monsters where her footnote reads: Here, I quote a liberal translation of Gramsci popularized by Slavoj Žižek (2010), which renders “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” as “Now is the time of monsters.”