DARKESTRAH “Turan” review (by Bart Tomaszewski (SEPULCROS PROD))

DARKESTRAH “Turan”
Osmose Productions

That’s time for some other kind of melodies. Well, after the name, logo and cover-art we can easily guess with what kind of music we’ll have to do. That’s of course Black Metal! Another quite typical thing for this kind of METAL is that musicians use stage pseudonyms. So we have here Resurgemus, Asbath, Cerritus, Merkith and Scythe. Band exists since 1999 and firstly was from the capitol of Kirgizstan, but now their base is in Leipzig, eastern Germany.

I already said that DARKESTRAH plays Black Metal. But as we all know there’re many kinds of this music, you can play it in different ways. Musicians call it as: “Epic Black Metal with Folk influences”. But in my opinion we have more to do with melodious and even atmospheric in some meaning one. Sorry, but I can’t hear a lot of this Folk here! The fact is that music is full of keyboards and sometimes instruments like violoncello, violin… But some, let’s call it, typical folk instruments I can hear rarely. So influences are but they’re  rather concealed and subtle. It takes even more general climate of music than stricte music, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, keyboards play blasphemous melodies. Resurgemus uses this instrument quite often. From other side it’s very often connected with drums and its faster parts and is rather in background. Music in general is in middle, sometimes faster tempos and prima facie there’s nothing special. But if we’ll listen to it at least a little more carefully then we’ll notice very interesting guitars’ work, many changes. The fact is that riffs are rather easy to play and so on. But isn’t it one of characteristic feathers of Black Metal?!? This music has first of all another goal: to warship Him – and that’s why DARKESTRAH’s lyrics talk about Satanism and Paganism (I don’t like this word coz I know what “paganus” primary means in Latin, so I prefer term: “Pre-Christian”, “Ancient” for example). Vocal here is typical Black Metal one what doesn’t mean that it’s in any way bored or something! Especially that Merkith has good diction – I can without any problem hear what he sings about. He does it (the same we can say about music) in melodic, but blasphemous way in the same time.

YEAH! To broadly speaking we have here very interesting music where happens a lot. The first song entitled “One with the grey spirit” begins from some kind of intro where we have declamation (I’m not a linguist, but it can be in Kirgiz) and melody which provide us to darkness where we stay next 52.24 – as long as we listen to it only one time. Songs are well-developed, the shortest one has 6.59, but all the time they drip with evil, all the time warship dark, mysterious, ancient and dangerous forces which rule over us in indivisible way. And these very often majestic beginnings of songs (but also artfully entwined parts in structure of these six music journeys) make this blasphemy even deeper, darker and more complete! It’s impossible to be sick of this album – even if you listen to it seventh or eleventh time in row!

(c) Bart Tomaszewski (SEPULCROS PROD)