We’re excited to join Portuguese atmospheric raw black/death metal necromancers Concilium in the release of their first proper debut album“Desecration” , a churning spectral emanation of total and agonizing death exhaling at the edge of a decaying void, scheduled to arrive on July 2 2021 on vinyl, cassette tape and digital formats via Sentient Ruin Worldwide.
While superficially a somewhat familiar listen, a close look will reveal “Desecration” as an unprecedented listening experience, as the Portuguese duo take the listener into a realm of moods and sensations that blackened death metal had rarely, if ever, really explored before. The astounding album in fact builds upon the foundations of the so called “war metal” subgenre of blackened death metal incorporating elements into it which it had rarely before been associated to, namely depressive black metal, raw black metal, and atmospheric doom, creating the peculiar result of introducing its own unseen strain of “sad” or “depressive” atmospheric war metal. The result is a deeply moving and immersive listen full of atmosphere and textural depth, qualities you wouldn’t normally find in such violent and pestilential recordings coming from the most uncompromising and fundamentalist subgenera of black/death metal.
Leading up the release iconic underground metal blog Last Rites has revealed part of the album’s sound via an exclusive premiere of the opening track “From the Chalice”, remarking that the track “is but a gateway to the world of punishing barbaric madness that Concilium have sculpted from the ruins of crumbling nightmares” and that “the record oozes with spiritual, mental, and aural toxicity that will draw plenty of cross-appeal for fans of the suffocating horrorscapes of Portal, the eerie orthodoxy of Deathspell Omega, the twisted brutality of Cryptae, the primitive doom ritualism of Beherit and Void Meditation Cult, and the raw catatonia of Black Cilice and Pa Vesh En - the crude wine that results on Desecration is one that is bitter, intoxicating, and, above all, heavier than sin.” - you can read their full feature and check out the track HERE.
Like the bastard child of Portal, Beherit, and Black Cilice, "Desecration" levitates from pure darkness with a miasma of tortured lamentations, serpentine whispers and suffocated screams radiating from the innermost depths of torment, while an incessant outflow of sepulchral lo-fi raw black/death metal murk reverberates through the abandoned pits of buried temples and lost sepulchers materializing a truly unsettling and ominous aural nightmare. The band's masterful texturing of decaying and sulphureous black/death metal with subterranean aphotic atmospheres and a diseased sense of occult ritualism creates a lightless aural twilight that embraces the listener like a disembodied disease, giving away way to a blood-freezing (and at times even moving) out of body experience.
While a new band, Concilium are bastions of the Portuguese musical underworld, with main members N. and Vulturius having years of experience in shaping their country’s small but thriving underground to what it is today, through various campaigns and collaborations over the years that have established them as corner pieces to their scene across the rise and fall of many obscure Portuguese black and death metal bands, existing and defunct, old and new.
The album features vocal contributions from American black metal vocalist Imber, as well as masterful artwork from Portuguese occult/esoteric visual artist Belial Necroarts.