Album Review: Black Door – Shadows of a Funerary Gleam

Album Review: Black Door – Shadows of a Funerary Gleam

Reviewed by Eric Clifford

If you have ears, then you are in need of black metal with which to fill them. It is what it is, I don’t make the rules. In observance of this, Black Door have essentially crafted a textbook for modern-day second wave inspired black metal. That’s not a new tome to write for sure, but it’s nonetheless possible to write it well, or write it poorly. It’s not always easy to articulate what separates a joyous modern rendition of the style from an underwhelming doppelgänger either, because it often comes down to gradations of how well different bands do very similar things. Fortunately, Black Door have not come to fuck around, and open fire with sulphurous, mephistophelean barrages of apex black metal riffs and harmonies that slam endless rounds into the bullseye between ferocity and melody. “Forged by Promethean Fire” is a masterclass of venomous animosity studded with brimstone hooks. Have you heard it all before? Absolutely, but when it’s done this well, it doesn’t dilute the thrill of it just because an outfit like French national treasure Mutiilation has a hundred songs of similar stripe. It’s epic, an aerial bombardment of raw guitars and hateful percussion that circles the killing field from on high like the descending hordes of the Tsva HaShamayim. A lethal ¾ time swing like scimitars through throats rows the song along towards the album’s conclusion with a confidence and passion that places it among the finer examples of traditional black metal that I’ve heard this year.

Each song is a tooth in a vast charcarodon maw of black metal. A back-end track like “Under the Yoke of an Older Spite” clamps down on writhing prey with one of the most malicious melodies on the album at 5.18, the song rumbling through tom hits until this final stretch when it javelins you through the eyeball with a stream of musical invective. Meanwhile, earlier blows – the title track for one – bring forth the blizzards with gushing curtains of frigid Immortal-esque chord progressions and reverb-saturated croaking like some demented cavern-dwelling frog deity. Raw but readable, a production like jaws yawning in the gloom stretches ahead, light enough for you to know full well what manner of death awaits while still that dark and obscure that imagination paints nightmares into the shadows. If not as harsh as the “Raw Black Metal” genre tag on metalarchives.com might imply, it’s still abrasive, ragged, sheathed in thorns and bone spurs. And it’s this that really seals the deal for me, this production style, taking material that seethes with reverence for unholy black metal and tomahawking it into your skull with all the might it’s arm can grant.

Even so, sometimes the album really is too close for comfort with it’s influences. Black Door would hardly be the first project to find inspiration in early Burzum, but even so parts of “Entrancement in Dusk…” do sound awfully close for to “Ea, Lord of the Depths”. It’s not as though Varg himself is averse to a bit of musical hijacking – among his many, many sins is…shall we say “homaging” a riff from Bathory’s “Necromancy” so closely that it’s a wonder he bothers to deny having pilfered it at all, but even so there are moments where Black Door’s own points of reference became a little too obvious for their own good. A few other quibbles remain. Nothing fatal, but “The Stale Humid Mist” bothers me in one of two ways that I can’t decide between. It’s slow, atmospheric, and deeply miserable. It’s also rather plodding and meandering – worse, it’s the second song on the album (discounting the brief intro) and after the barnburner that precedes it (the title track) “The Stale Humid Mist” feels as though it stalls the album’s engine a bit. If it were placed perhaps after the following track (“Entrancement in Dusk…”) then the sense of stunted momentum would be reduced, though that wouldn’t solve the issue of it being probably the weakest of the brood overall.

The above gripes – among a few others (I’m not wild about the clean vocals that crop up here and there) – shoved out of the way for a beat, Black Door otherwise mercilessly storm the ramparts and slaughter the wailing unfortunates trapped within. The wheels on its chariot remain steadfastly beyond reinvention of course, but the conviction and songwriting Black Door hold in reserve is more than enough to keep the old tropes as rewarding as ever. So it is that the black flame flares still. Before it’s beckoning fingers do the holy tremble, through it’s billowing smog do legions vomit lungfuls of steaming blood, within the crackle of it’s embers does the sum total of all knowable agony see infliction upon shrieking, writhing flesh. And for so long as bands like Black Door draw breath, it will continue to flare forever more.

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