Album Review: Ash Magick - Rituals of Anathematic East
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
We’ve not done badly for black metal this year; the morbid spectre stalks all corners of the globe, the seven seas crimson at it’s passing as though the salt within it bleeds at contact. From Egypt, Lycopolis unleash “Sons of Set”, the sand dunes undulating beneath their wrath, the Nile itself boiling dry ‘neath pale skies blotted by locust swarms. Not to be outdone, the reaper trod also the cursed earth of America, calling forth Blighted Elder and a gluttonous monstrosity named “Upon Merciless Flame”, stalking and gorging itself on manflesh wherever it treads. Dark handcraft is at work within Scandanavia too, where the cresting waves of …And Oceans grind the shoreline to dust, clogging it’s rocky chokepoints and river mouths with corpses. Yet in the presence of such assembled force, there are those brave souls who would plant their feet, don the corpsepaint, Light a cigarette, and say “watch this”. Ash Magick, hailing from Istanbul, are such souls.
Ash Magick are bestowing so much of what I want in a black metal album here; the acidic rawness saws away at you, hacking ragged chasms into your flesh so that the cold iron mattocks of the drums enjoy unimpeded access to the bones they long to splinter. Vocals rupture from minced throats, crackling like lighting across a web of shining wire. Eerie undertones and ambience, bulging like ripe infection, secretions spilling putrescence in slick streams. It’s an antihumanist rampage, a bleak tirade against the conceptual decency at the core of mankind. It’s not new or original; herein lurks no reinvention of the wheel nor inspired reimagining of timeworn tropes. Instead, the approach it takes is to gather in it’s charred arms all that is mighty, all that is misanthropic, all that is scornful and deadened to joy or optimism, about black metal and fling it with impassioned disgust at you.
There is a guitar tone here in the technical sense of the term, but to hear it is to be confronted by this autophagic cannibal god of black metal righteousness. Vocals bleed reverb, echoing like shrieks down the hollowed bones of titans. Gelid coruscations of dark fire carve flowing vortex tattoos into burnt horizons; this cold wave of distortion, great forge-tide of Hephaestus’ inverted twin, it’s protean spears thrust to pierce the hearts of the stars. Drums crash like thunderheads, the atmosphere itself flayed screaming from the world below, sinuous tendrils of it burning to nothingness in the void above. I’ve heard this before – a sample of it’s vile emanations as a promo single on the ever reliable Apocalyptic Witchcraft label. I was most impressed. Stars aligned; a day later the full album showed up for review and I pounced upon it like a starved jackal, only to find myself rended asunder in it’s stead.
It’s melodies are the mortar in a wall of sound. Malevolent swells of ambience within “The Kneeling Wretch” atop riffs akin to being quartered by a chainsaw rush to meet the discordant ringing of plucked notes that linger and seep out like mortuary bells in the belly of Dante’s ninth circle, it’s closure the distant wardrums of conquering hordes amid ministrations from pagan pulpits. “Beyond Dara’s Gates” joins a classic sprinting kick drum / 2nd beat snare frame and an advancing forest of scythe riffs in bleak matrimony before lunging into unholy tapping leads and a final stretch that slows down from 3.40, chords and monolithically muscled percussion slamming down with strength enough to split the earth down to it’s quivering core. No quarter exists, no step grants safety from it’s capacity to ravage. “Silent Ruin, None Evade” is inaccurate only in that it is by no conceivable standard silent. Rather, it is an insalubrious stormfront of a million poisoned edges all thirsting for fresh veins from which to drink. The proficiency of your defences carries consequence only insofar as to emphasise the futility of your resistance; as well lock yourself in a plywood wardrobe, it will save Ash Magick the trouble of finding a coffin. It feels as though it marshals the same pestilent malfeasance that the best of Xasthur does, this torrid well of enshrouding bleakness that siphons joy from you like a leech. Smothering. Deadening. Like swimming in the styx.
Pain is unpleasant but there is no tutor more dutiful. As the haunting recurrent motif of “Day of Resurrection”, the penultimate track of the album, recedes back into the black like a phantasmal apparition walking the stone floors of a charnel house, the sense was that I’d heard something definitively special. That it’s the best track of a set imbued with withering power is true, but these things are always a case of a whole being greater than the sum of it’s parts. Every note of this album is played with the aim of evoking corruption, the aural equivalent of arterial flow in the baptismal font. “Day of Resurrection” repeats the tricks of it’s predecessor songs, but it perfects them. Netherworld screams are in force throughout the album, but it’s here that they are at their most ominous. Riffs slathered with venom reign supreme wherever the eye alights, but the toxicity here reaches unheard of lethality. Sickly melody a common feature, yet never so infectious as those pathogens here cultivated. Everything – every single mote of the release – is at it’s epochal prime in this latter spree of pain and suffering meaning that, as it should be, the album comes to closure at the height of it’s powers. In case it was somehow not obvious, this track is the indisputable empress of the legion unleashed by Ash Magick on this utterly masterful display of the blackest of black arts.
What Ash Magick have done here is fucking stupendous. I know that sometimes it isn’t played with watertight proficiency, that the production is a rough acquired taste, and that sometimes the snare gets lost in the mix. I don’t care. I have scoured every shelf in my capacious vault of fucks and found not one to give. This is an unstoppable hunting party of a release that greets your presence with total overkill. It’s merciless, uncompromising, and every God damn thing I could ask for from a black metal album in 2025. I’d hold my tongue when it comes to calling it a masterpiece; fundamentally it brings nothing new to the table – if every black metal album copied Ash Magick’s template for the next hundred years then the releases would be excellent but the genre would have advanced no further than it had a century ago. so I can’t place it alongside something like “A Blaze in the Northern Sky” or “De Mysteriis dom Sathanas” purely on the basis that those albums represented the evolution of a genre at the time of their release. But – and understand that I love both of those albums like my own limbs – I enjoy this new Ash Magick manifestation every stray angstrom as much as it’s esteemed forefathers. There is no hesitation on my part in giving this album the highest of high recommendations; I beseech you, urge you, compel you to the fullest extent to which I am capable to buy this shit the nanosecond opportunity presents itself.
