For me, ABIGOR lost its soul after the release of "Nachthymnen". This CD was fucking brilliant, as the two previous ones, and then the band's releases started to become shitty. I will not comment the "Opus IV" CD, but first, the "Apokalypse" MCD was a kind of brutal black metal, which was not the path followed by the first 3 albums of the bands, and you could feel that the band should have followed its first way instead of changing its style (unlike BEHEMOTH for example), because the change was not a good thing for them (like SATYRICON or DODHEIMSGARD in a sense). The next CD, "Supreme Immortal Art", was even worse. They tried there to play a sort of modern, complex yet brutal black metal but the magic of the first years was gone and this album was boring, uninteresting and represented a kind of swan song of the band. So you certainly guessed I was not really enthusiastic when I got that "Channeling..." album. When I listened to it, I realised that the band had decided to follow the way of their two previous CD releases, which was quite courageous. I don't like this kind of black metal, but I have to admit that this CD is the best one they have realized after "Nachthymnen", at least it's better than the '97 MCD and the '98 CD. So, the music here is still a sort of modern black metal (but be careful, no "space keyboards" here, it's not modern BM ala SATYRICON or THORNS),with a strange (unique ?) production, extremely complex (YOU will have to feel or not the quintessence of ABIGOR's new musical orientation). It's still fast & without any compromise yet. If you only know the first releases of the band, I suggest you to listen to this befor you buy it ; if you liked "Apoklaypse" and "Supreme...", you can buy this album, you will like it for sure.

rating:
for pre'96 fans : 4 /10
for those who like the "post'97" period : 7 / 10

© 2001 lord pesten