Don’t Mess with the Dark Arts, Kids, or Sorguinazia Will Get You
If you’ve got sixteen minutes to spare and you’re open to spending them in exquisite spiritual agony, Sorguinazia has got something for you.
It’s a three-song demo which, for those of you of a certain aesthetic persuasion, will have you salivating for their impending debut full-length album for Vault of Dried Bones. In essence, this demo takes the full bag of tricks from black metal’s lauded second wave, drenches the whole thing in blood and tosses it in a cauldron full of rendered baby fat and rat feces. What this means sonically is that all these down-home razor riffs are blown out and cavernous, in danger of drifting off into some negative ether, anchored only by a smartly audible bass. The drummer isn’t afraid to throw in a heaping portion of maniacal fills—well-executed fills at that, which is something precious and rare in the world of raw black metal.
And the vocals. Oh the vocals. There are some classic black metal shrieks hiding in here, but most of the vocals sound like the artifacts of some bad trip, the memory of which you’ve not-so-successfully repressed through years of therapy, medication and spiritual retreats. There are strangely reverberating wails that are panned hard right or hard left, uncouth wobbling gibberish, and pre-verbal feral caterwauling. The total effect is charmingly off-its-rocker. It is as if Sorguinazia, standing on the shoulders of all the adepts that have come before, have finally struck upon the correct concoction of grimness, misanthropy and ritual blasphemy to scratch away the surface of this reality; they have not yet punched through the thin walls separating this universe from the other, but the dents they’ve made have rendered that which waits beyond menacingly audible.
In short, Sorguinazia is a band to watch. Not content to merely ape what worked for their genre forefathers, they are striking out with suicidal abandon into some unmentionable beyond.
Sorguinazia’s self-titled demo is available digitally now. The cassette will be available here on November 4th, 2016, with an LP version to follow in March of next year.
