Sacrificial Vein – Black Terror Genesis (Review)

Sacrificial Vein are a black metal band from the US and this is their debut album.

Containing the singer of Nothingness in their ranks, Sacrificial Vein play avant-garde/dissonant black metal. Black Terror Genesis is a 47-minute journey into darkness.

I like it when an album just starts – no fanfare, just right into it, just as colossal opener The Blood of the Wicked Shall Entomb the Earth does. With a serpentine riff that slithers between realities, it’s an extradimensional beast of a song, all malignant melody and crushing distorted blackness.

Black Terror Genesis is an exercise in modern black metal that’s powered by a formidable dissonant presence and an occult aura of impending apocalypse. With an experimental, chaotic edge, and ferocious blackened death metal components, it makes for an immersive and terrifying listening experience. It’s heavy on the atmosphere, (and just heavy overall), and the songwriting focus is on worldbuilding via lightless mood and malevolent character. Echoes of bands such as Deathspell Omega, Blut aus Nord, Schammasch, Gaerea, and Aosoth haunt the album, but Sacrificial Vein take their influences and make something of their own with them. Hero-worship this is not.

These tracks twist and turn down eerie passages, leading to a fettered madness at the heart of the labyrinth that drives Black Terror Genesis ever deeper into the abyss. The journey is filled with esoteric sights and hideous sounds, revealing the torment that energises the voyage, while oppressive atmosphere threatens to occlude the harrowing vistas from all that wish to learn their secrets.

The shadow cast by Black Terror Genesis is long and dark, inflicting untold horror to any that step within its shaded embrace. If you can withstand such an assault, then this is an album to explore over time, weathering its devastation to gain rare rewards.