Dutch black metal band Kaeck have blessed us with a preview of the album in full song uploaded to Youtube and a treated us with a look at the album artwork. Consistent with the symbolic anti-religious blasphemy with an occult atmosphere that longs for deeper knowledge and understanding of the world that goes beyond dogma and into the heretical, the artwork displays perhaps somewhat cliche yet nonetheless symbolic objects of mystic research that become the tools for the pushing of boundaries of permitted knowledge. It is both rebellious and underground, subversive and hidden — a quiet revolution of plane-wanderers, mystics and malcontent visionaries that realize that the world at hand cannot contain the ideals they are looking for, launching them in a quest for the truth that is a desperate and hopeful reaching-out for the future and simultaneously nostalgic of an illusory grand past .
In “Afgod”, Kaeck present us with a condensed and focused incarnation of these sentiments. A heavy use of repetition with slight variation in a minimalist piece that can only be crafted by the most expert of black metal composers — not musicians or artists. Every single part is significant and important, ingrained indispensably in the framework of the music in a way that its function is not only amplified locally, but that makes the piece as a whole enhanced so that when all these elements are together (the understated drums, the melody-carrying enveloping keyboards, the saturating guitars and the maddened vocals) a surprisingly layered result whose individual elements are engaging but have nowhere near the power and reach of the created entity born when the sounds are brought together. And on the timeline, no single riff, no single repetition can account for the effect of the total song.This is the hallmark of superior and successful minimalist black metal. Greatness in any music, such as this, lies in the unified journey and the coalescing elements: a vision encompassing the whole vertically and horizontally.
Edit: “Alfgod” was taken down, but a link for another song in the album was uploaded and linked below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8xLpfbe9bY&feature=youtu.be
Tags: 2015, Black Metal, kaeck, minimalist, mystics, Stormkult
Swear to god this is 2015’s “Godless Arrogance”
It is a completely different thing, but on the same level of quality.
Sounds closer to early Sammath, which is a good thing in my ears.
A little reminiscent of Strijd, but far more condensed.
Actually It has a more ‘dirgey’ sounding pure black metal style as opposed to Godly Arrogance.
Mr Rosales could i request a review/evaluation of Rudra’s albums?
write to editor@deathmetal.com with the details of what are asking for… are you part of the band, btw?
Love the track. That early keyboard melody gets inverted and suspended as above a metronome. Great piece.
I cant access the link it just says “video is private”
Its settings were apparently changed in the course of a few hours…
Thanks David, it’s working now. Actually I was trying to find something negative to criticise but it is in fact sounding really good, though maybe I prefer the more chaotic sound of the recent Sammath album a bit more. Cheers