Manes
Under Ein Blodraud Maane
[Hammerheart]


This release breathes all the atmosphere that black metal releases from the early 90s breathe... In fact the songs are written in the period 1990-1994 and are re-recordings of old difficult-to-obtain demo tracks. It starts with the beautiful cover painted by Monika Edvartsen, showing a naked couple making love, but it doesn't look very loving... Their hair is red, the ground they lie on is red, and the woman on top seems to be... consuming the (dead?) man in all her passion. It's a grim cover actually, grim and sensual at the same time. It creates the ideal setting for a dark and melancholic black metal record.

With morbid screams clocking about 1:20 "Min trone står til evig tid" starts and after that a cruel buzzsaw guitar accompanied by relentless pounding claws at you. The first track is by all means the fastest one, the remainder is slow to mid-paced eerie, creepy, dark, fog-drenched and intensely cold music which made me sometimes think of Graveland's "The Celtic Winter". This does not mean that Manes are copycats, this means that "Under Ein Blodraud Maane" has the same black intensity and aural hate the old Graveland had.

Murky swamp riffs flow over a rhythm section plodding through the mud, and all over it are the vocals of Sargatanas, incoherent, grim, sorrowful. Cernunnus plays the instruments and he is more than able to do so, not in a technical way, but in a BLACK METAL way. Sparse synths and sometimes piano add more atmosphere and "Uten liv ligger landet øde" even features a wailing guitar lead. This stuff is highly addictive. If you've become fatalistic about norwegian black metal, go listen to Manes (or Taake, for that matter) and become convinced that dark und okkult blakk metal is still being made. HAILS!


© 2000 dwaallicht