Dragged Into Sunlight: King Diamond become more black metal, with D-beat groove, baby... they're sludgy detuned black metal, with basement (dungeon?)-esque production to boot... they're lovers of lots of overdubbed excerpts from sinister-sounding soundbytes/ movies, not unlike White/Rob Zombie, or bits of Exodus' Pleasures of the Flesh....
They've trebly-yet-low tunings, blast beats that segue well into lurching riffs, vocals so buried they're like a meth addict screaming from the apartment next door in your tenement in the Dis section of Hell....
They require some degree of desensitization to appreciate (like black metal)-- Tracks?
"Boiled Angel," lurches fro and to... "Buried With Leeches," (at 1:43 becomes noticeably louder; highlights cheap --tr00?-- production), and at 4:44 drops into a lurching two-chord riff with tribal drumming slowly emerging from underneath... then sounds like a thrash band's breakdown (but all while sounding like the same band, not a hodge-podge of styles), nicely blended....
Final track "Totem of Skulls," is purely ambient, studded with audio tracks of... excerpted psychotic manifesto talking points... Manson ready for CNN....
Severely-abused-child-with-psychotic-disorder's-drawing cover art aside, much more put together and worth hearing than you might think....
Ogen: Black Metal Unbound:Nice production (i.e., bass), very cool chord changes (in tracks --"traccias"-- one and two), blast beats used sparingly, but well when so used....
Track two, "Black Tusk Retaliation," [Italian Black Metal etymology?] seemingly taps directly into the Archetypal Fear of Man, when Mankind was of caves and cookfires....
Evocative soundscapes/ almost soundtracks for a wilderness-- each track drops into rhythmic, almost "breakdown"-type parts to invoke the savage prehistorical dances of men around a fire at night, ecstatic with their however-temporary transcendence in appeal to God....
"Crest of the Forgotten" has cool 6/8 time choral section;
"As a leaden Sun shineth upon," shows you what you've been suspecting about the music so far: it's not the blast beats, or the open-chord over choral vocals, or the occasional gallops at 300 bpm (all the black metal staples, basically) that sets this album apart: it's the chord voicings, plus the odd, dissonant chord progressions that stick with you: initially they can be very disconcerting to the ear (and so the brain)-- the chords crash up against each other, sounding odd and eerie; however, after getting used to the alien beauty of the chords, "normal" chord progressions like you hear in every pop song, sound so bland so as to barely register as sound, let alone music: it's almost like Ogen is so heavy that even their chord progressions, not the Black Metal parts, but the so-called "relaxing" ambient/drone parts (without lyrics, usually) are desensitizing in and of themselves.
A heavier Alcest?
Songs nicely economical; short....
Not Winter music, like the cover would suggest, but late Autumn music: music pregnant with the sadness of the coming loss, the things to die, the fear that they may not return, the fear that you've angered the sun, that the dark may not go away, that your best days are behind you... a very primitive fear, embodied in these chord changes....
Dragged Into Sunlight is immediately gratifying; Ogen will grow on you.
--Horn
Buy here: Hatred for Mankind
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