This is the fourth album from French black metal band Haemoth.
After 12 years of silence since their last release, Haemoth now bring the world the 46-minute Black Dust. It’s traditional black metal, filled with satanic violence and unholy hatred.
Black Dust is primarily an assault of pure black metal darkness. It’s a raw and merciless attack, all bladed guitars and serrated screams. The songs move through different paces and dynamics, from unforgiving speed to destructive groove and bottomless darkness. Harsh electronics/noise components are used in places to augment the black metal core, (most notably on the noise cut Human Defects, bleak interlude Fragments of the Sign, and ambient mood piece Void Theory). It’s an approach to black metal that simultaneously feels ancient and contemporary.
For the songs themselves, it’s the riffs that cause the most damage. The guitars, sharpened by the coldest ice, claw into the frozen earth, leaving scars that the devouring distortion hungrily fills. Thus given form, they coalesce into maleficent songs that seem to be the embodiment of malevolent shadow. This lends Black Dust an obscure atmosphere that’s at once reassuringly familiar and unsettlingly other.
Haemoth have a keen understanding of this form of atavistic misanthropic black metal. The aura of arcane terror that forcibly inhabits their infernal art bleeds from every scathing pore. This sets Black Dust apart from many of its peers. There’s an ineffable otherness to the music, a quality of something impossible to define that manifests throughout the running time, something that can only be realistically termed black fucking metal. It sounds obvious, and it is, but this is a record of true blackened nightmare.
Hyperbole aside, Black Dust is simply a very good record. It won’t convince many who aren’t already fans of the style, but that’s not the point. Haemoth exist for themselves and for those that can’t get enough of this form of raw, violent, blackened darkness. If this is you, Black Dust is a black metal album that’s worth spending time with. It’s a very compelling and moreish listen.
Very highly recommended.
Wonderbox Metal 