Album Review: Tabernakel – Scheintaufe
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Tabernakel put me in an awkward spot. Their flensed-to-the-viscera approach takes such obvious joy in delivering nasty, stripped down early 90’s black metal that it’s hard not to appreciate. But on the other hand, Christ if it doesn’t sound a lot like Darkthrone, uprooted and planted in Germanic soil. It’s the trve Norwegian vintage served in a beerstein, and that much is hinted at simply by a glance at the obviously Darkthrone-inspired logo that Tabernakel roll with. Maybe that’s unfair – on it’s own merits “Scheintaufe” (“Mock Baptism” in English) contains enough Teutonic sacrilege to satisfy the even the most grim and frostbitten of us. Still. It would be nice to hear a bit more of Tabernakel’s own personality sneaking between the charred timbers of the churches it puts to the torch.
Predictable as it may be, there’s a reason why raw, buzzing guitars, booming drums and raspy shrieks became tropes in the first place – it’s because they sound fucking awesome. As such, when “Sanguis” hammers into it’s blastbeats over a classic black thrash riff at 1.12 there’s no sense in pretending that I wasn’t loving life. Propulsive percussion whips the cascade of “Blood, Fire, Death” doppelganger strummed riffs to a march ahead of it, and high string tremolo lines like starving barracudas slip ravenous through the murk of the production job. At it’s strongest, Tabernakel’s clandestine séance summons in that same evil magic that suffused those same 2nd wave classics. Grimy and atavistic, it prioritises mood and atmosphere with salvos of simple but malfeasant power chord progressions and augmentations, slithering minor key melodies and a harsh, confrontational production. It’s quite spartan in some ways – a man, some drums, a bass, a guitar, and some serious emotional difficulties, and out pops “Im Nebel” – a snapping, deceptively melodic slice of treble-forward Prussian profanity built around tremolo-picked arpeggios and kick-snare beats that fire off like counterpunches. It is, in a nutshell, old school black metal as fuck.
Besides it’s growth-limiting adherence to the fundamental tenets of the genre, the other main flaw comes as much as a product of it being a one man project as anything else – an occasional struggle to self edit. This album is on the whole good stuff for sure, but even so the longer songs can feel a bit adrift in search of a destination sometimes. If comparatively brief tracks like “Wie Die Gischt” impress with cruel harmonies and devilish swaps between fast and slow sections, then longer tracks like “Schlussel zum Sanktum” dull their edge with lengthy acoustic sections or decent but derivative mid-paced strumming. The album is long enough that being a bit more severe about what wound up on the cutting room floor wouldn’t have been a crime. The synth interlude “Trugbild des Selbst” isn’t unendurable, but nor is it enthralling, relying on basic textures and progressions for four minutes at somnolent pace. Perhaps an interlude was in order but this one is far too average to deserve being stapled into the tracklist.
The crux of it is that A Blaze in the German Sky can be very enjoyable, but it’s also incapable of surprising you and comes with a little basket of compositional foibles to boot. It evokes a nostalgic vibe and mostly does justice to it, but a harsher stance on the editing process and a bit more imagination would’ve done it the world of good. This being Tabernakel’s second album within the space of a year the project seems to have a fair bit of creative vim to it, so hopefully for round 3 we see this same magnificent old school black metal taken to more uncharted waters.
For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.
