HATE FOREST Battlefields 180 gram LP ukrainian black metal Drudkh Astrofaes NEW
Sold Date:
January 25, 2017
Start Date:
October 15, 2012
Final Price:
$26.98
(USD)
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HATE FOREST Battlefields (180 gram) LP
HATE FOREST Battlefields (180 gram) LP
__________________________________________________________
(Back On Black)
*** This is a new and unplayed item, direct from the CRUCIAL BLAST shop. ***
DESCRIPTION FROM CRUCIAL BLAST:
Available on 180 gram vinyl in a gatefold jacket.
Up until recently, I was mostly unfamiliar with Hate Forest, having heard only a smattering of their music in the past even though I've been a fan of Drudkh for years, but now that I've been getting in their new reissues on Osmose and Back In Black, I'm becoming pretty obsessed with their albums. Hate Forest's evil and epic black metal adds some surprising industrial and experimental touches to their sound, but there's no mistaking this for anything other than black metal, with that strange, ancient feeling of mystery that seems to permeate the music of so many bands from the Ukrainian black metal scene. These amazing albums are now available on both Cd from Osmose Productions in gatefold packaging with new artwork and expanded booklets, as well as on deluxe vinyl from Back In Black.
Battlefields from 2003 was Hate Forest's third album, released on the British label Supernal Music, a good fit with the sort of quirky, misanthropic black metal that the label was known for championing. The seven tracks on the album mark some of Hate Forest's most emotionally stirring music, a blend of blazing hateful black metal, Ukrainian folk music, and experimental elements that evoke the horrors and triumphs of war, and in total make for some of the most unique black metal to ever come out of the Slavic BM underground. The opening song is a short folk vocal arrangement that sends chills up my spine whenever I hear it, a sorrowful, triumphant crying out of women's voices that sounds both ancient and urgent. A perfect introduction to the smoldering terror of
Battlefields, leading into the epic nine minute track “With Fire And Iron". Horrific, death metal-esque vokills rage over a clanking backbeat, a slow almost militaristic rhythm that sounds more like something from a martial neo-folk album from Der Blutharsch or Von Thronstahl, and swarming clouds of buzzing, washed out guitar, then it shifts into a vicious combination of that clanking industrial percussion and a driving, mid-paced black metal riff, that distinct epic sound that's indicative of Ukrainian black metal clearly heard in there, but joined by this weird mechanized pounding, which later adds in some booming tympani style drums. The repetitive riffs that curl around the constant pounding drums also add to the industrial feel, and then at the end we hear bells tolling overhead, and suddenly the song seems to invert, the music suddenly playing backwards as it fades out.
Another short folk song appears next, setting up the next sprawling track "Our Fading Horizons". Black orchestral ambience drifts in, an oceanic wash of ominous sound sweeping in alongside more of those tolling church bells, and crushing doom-laden chords slowly fading into view. Then the band kicks into another martial warmarch, rattling battlefield snare drums leading this blackened dirge across scorched bloodstained fields, the monstrous vocals switching back and forth to haunting choral vocals. The song shifts into furious double bass drumming as those choruses reappear, and then suddenly it kicks into overdrive, the guitars becoming a vicious mosquito-blur, the drums launching into a weirdly mechanized blast beat while another marching rhythm appears behind them at the same time, creating this strange multi-layered black blast gradually joined by more kettledrums and other orchestral sounds.
The third folk song is the most mournful, sounding like a funeral lament, the weathered voice rich with heartache. And then, "Glare Over Slavonic Lands", the final black metal song of the album, taking all of the martial percussion, clanking drums, battle choirs and black guitarswarm, monstrous proclamations and majestic riffs of the previous songs and forging them into a spellbinding wardirge. Lush synths and washes of ethereal drift appear throughout the track as it moves from crawling power to driving force, never lightening the utterly solemn atmosphere that the band creates so effectively here. It's followed by the album's final track, which is nothing more than the sound of weeping Ukrainian mothers and sobbing children wracked with the agony of loss, the impassioned singing amid their anguish making this an arresting finale.
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