Absu - The Sun of Tiphareth
Review: Epic black metal stylings encompass a heart of older style metal, with an album reminiscent of Slayer's early work in the structural creation of each song and the rhythmic metastyle used to hold these riffs together into song. Absu's gritted-teeth vocal scream and chanted recitations melt into the background swimming with strumming rhythm repeated over chord and melody shift: the evil shuddering speed of nervous deconstruction.
The nature of embellishment on most metal records as a chance to show off the keyboards in the name of "open-mindedness" contrasts egregiously the diligent integration of certain choice paganistic intros, clean guitar parts in the folk style, and insertion of non-guitar instruments that occurs here. A risky line was towed with this method of retro-metal in its search for a quest and a sound; underneath aesthetics it is not dissimilar to other black metal and death metal bands in the populist school of atonality, but with some careful structural work and liberally applied good taste, Absu have brought out the structural finesse within the genre.
1. Apzu 
2. Feis Mor Tir Na N'og (Across the North Sea To Visnech)
3. Cyntefyn's Fountain
4. A Quest Into the 77th Novel
5. Our Lust for Lunar Plains (Nox Luna Inlustris)
6. The Coming of War
7. The Sun of Tiphareth
Well-paced work muscled with rippingly fast chord groups and single-string speed strumming drives along probing structures while vigilant drumming nails out violent processions of morbidly entropic beats, keeping the obscurity high as tension over the dominant vibration of guitar. Any atmospheric or ambient effects to this music come from the flutterstrum of the guitar, which mediates the articulation of the riff under the dominant chord change, allowing a greater degree of inflection; its mesmerizing cyclic tendency hypnotizes with linear voicings of complex rhythms broken into a datastream of fast picking. With a combination of the black metal primal mysticism, death metal nihilism and the gothic theatrics of a horror show, this band not only use themselves to throw an image at the listener but make solid ripping death/black metal as well.