Necromantia - Black Arts Lead to Everlasting Sins (split with Varathron)
Review: Someone mixed folk-music voice rhythms and 70s hybrid metal rock into a modern package with bizarre conceptions of darkness. Ambitious, it incorporates a saxophone and other horns into a slow ritual beat song "Evil Prayers" and pulls it off through vocal rhythm and tribal beats despite the inherently repetitive nature of the riff heavily repeated.
There are many guest musicians on this album, but the format they fall into is musically-aware simple rock of power chords laid out in slack upbeat rhythms and chorus passages. In many ways similar to Judas Priest, this band construct verse chorus songs that expand into extended transitions for dramatic use, creating an epic effect even within this gurgling, rasping, organic production. While guitar work is tasteful, it is heavy metal more than black metal although both black and death metal technique are used.
Shrieking tempest vocals of evil spread like a thick sauce over rhythm and tone, encoding all heard beneath as if to remove some of its fundamentally space-rock nature, but in essence Necromantia is evil rock with a heavily artistic gothic melancholy despite its rhythmically friendly nature.