Album Review: Infernal Presence – Fiery Paths
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
The nights come crawling quickly these days; dusk surrenders it’s vigil in the sharp snap of clicked fingers and once more does starlight alone peer curious and detached down at as. The chill, too. I’m one of those weird types that likes it dark and cold, having contracted some weird mirror version of seasonal affective disorder wherein I am stricken with indefatigable ennui upon exposure to warmth or sunlight. This time of year, when the daylight adopts shorter shifts, suits me just fine. And while I’m never not in the mood to listen to black metal, there’s definitely times and places in which it feels most appropriate. And now, just as the first frosts begin to web the windows, feels as good a time as any to dive into a fresh blackened offering from Germany’s Infernal Presence.
Sometimes you can tell whether you’ll like something within a few seconds of hearing it. That didn’t happen here, mostly on account of a reasonable but inessential introductory track, but relations warmed almost immediately as soon as the meat of the release loosed it’s fetters. “Eternal Exodus” launches into a sprint from a drum fill into a broken chord progression that ascends like the dead clambering cold soils to the surface. There is, be not beshitted, the argument that it often sounds like classic Mayhem a bit too much. Infernal Presence sidestep this thorny issue by choosing to sound like a lot like Craft as well (listen to “White Noise and Black Metal”; you’ll hear a wealth of the crucifying march to Golgotha that Infernal Presence also deploy in particular on “Tomb Procession”). It slams it’s bannerpole clean through the splintered ribs of the opposition to claim abundant lands indeed; those enviable borderlands at which raw grit meets infectious yet haunting melodicism that characterised the scream of second wave black metal output.
The line between EP and LP is an ill-defined one; technically this is an EP But considering that it’s around about the runtime of Reign in Blood, talking of it as such feels inappropriate. There’s probably an argument there that this is a bit on the truncated side, but equally there’s much to be said for quality over quantity, brevity, and getting straight to the fucking point. As the hornet swarm melody lines of “Beyond the Blackness” smash headfirst into a brutal thrash section, who am I to bemoan a stingy length when every second is utilised to such destructive extents? At 4.40, when the spectral talons of the riff course forth with the stygian pulse of the bass and blastbeats pin the faithful to their rotting crosses, complaints seem faintly anaemic voiced aloud.
There’s a flair for the epic evident; the procession once victory is secured as important as the campaign itself. Mephistopheles’ mad cackle born in human throats carves ravines in the sky as the vocals flow like thunderheads. The eponymous closing track leverages this with a barbarous groove and these diseased arpeggios that flavour the poundage of it’s villainous midtempo palm mutes. The bass adorns these riffs with an impossible weight, though for however much I enjoy the cavernous timbre it wields, on headphones there is a distinct white-noise hiss to it that felt occasionally distracting. It hardly ruins the experience – nothing close to it – and I’ll contentedly weather whatever trite accusations of stubborn anachronistic musical preferences inevitably follow when I point out that black metal is best when it’s raw as fuck, but even so that persistent sibilance did wear on me awfully quickly.
So there are flaws there, in it’s dwarven duration, engaging but unremarkable introduction, and the production having a lisp. But none of that matters to me much in the grand scheme of things. I’m not going to plop myself in front of Lucifer and decry his music for the sake of a little hissing, especially when it is, definite faults aside, fucking excellent otherwise. The year nears closure, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have heard some thoroughly superb black metal within it. Infernal Presence scale the pile with the grace of an appropriately devilish mountain goat to graze upon souls in it’s cloud-throttled upper reaches. Yes, it’s a bit short, but that just means you’ll have more time to jam it into your ear holes, doesn’t it?
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