Welcome to the Sky Burial (Tibetan: བྱ་གཏོར་), the ancient Himalayan ritual burial dating back to centuries of the Tibetan Buddhism tradition of taking the bodies of the deceased amongst the highest peaks to be dismembered and consumed at sacred burial grounds by vultures and other scavenging animals, and then dissolved by the high altitude elements, or as the tradition states, to be returned to the sky. What may seem a brutal or savage practice to western eyes in reality is a revered and elitarian burial in ancient Himalayan culture, and this concept borrowed by Portuguese black metal nekromancers Concilium for their immense third offering "Sky Bvrial" has laid the foundations for an absolute beast of an album and for one of the most otherworldly and death-scarred extreme metal releases of the year.
Foreshadowing the album’s gruesome birth is an exclusive advance track premiere of the track “From the Moon to the Mountain” by reputable underground metal blog Last Rites, who in introducing the death-crushing track have remarked how “Sky Bvrial, feels like an embrace of the crude death worship of Beherit reaching for a further, more reverent understanding of the violence and transcendence of what we so arrogantly call The End.“ - you can checkout the track and their feature HERE.
Truly immense in its scope and vision, just like the death ritual it recounts and evokes, "Sky Bvrial" channels the omnipotence and darkness of death through a majestic lens of transcendence, ritualism and contemplative reverence toward the power of nature and of the immortality of ancient lore. The nauseating stench of death emanates from every knit and fabric of this beastly record, as the black flame of highly atmospehric sepulchral black metal bands like Demoncy, Teitanblood, and Beherit is re-ignited to conjure visions of a churning, monstrous vortex of rotting dismembered flesh levitating towards heaven, and taken skyward to be returned to the afterlife by massive carnivorous scavenging birds. A truly unparalleled and moving listening experience conjured through seven primeval slabs of merciless, crushing neckromantik black metal counterbalanced by tremendously enveloping sepulchral atmospherics and contemplative dirges of transcendence.
While a new band, Concilium are bastions of the Portuguese musical underworld, with main member/songwrtier N. and collaborators Vulturius and Occelensbrigg 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. N. forged his talents and visions in such Portuguese aural plagues like Summon and Hate Propaganda, and Concilium is his brainchild and outlet to an inner underworld dominated by hallucinations of finality, agony, and hopelessness. Handling all songwriting, composition, artwork (under the Belial Necroarts banner), and guitars and vocals during recording, N. is then joined in the project’s final recording stages of the studio setting by Vulturius handling drums (Irae, Kommando Baphomet, Necrobode, Morte Incandescente and many more) and by Occelensbrigg on bass, thus completing the circle of Concilium’s sound: a nightmarish trip into the pits of hell where the historic sounds of violent and apocalyptic bands like Pseudogod, Blasphemy, Proclamation and Beherit are deconstructed and pulverized, whipped into a new spectral and decaying shape by heavy doses of decrepit and agonizing raw/depressive black metal and submerged into aphotic and subterranean realms with a masterful texturing of sulphureous atmospheres and diseased esoteric dirges.