Black Crucifixion - Faustian Dreams
March 20 2008 at 11:24:22 PM
Often erroneously cast as the pet-project of Beherit members, Black Crucifixion nevertheless shares a historically and critically accurate place beside Finland’s premiere Black Metal monster. They represent, in part, a lost era in that countries burgeoning underground metal scene, pregnant with such essential dark materials. Yet the group, founded by Timo Livari (Forn, Fornicator) in 1991, completed only two EPs worth of music (Promethean Gift and Flowing Downwards, later re-released as The Fallen One in Flames) before disbanding a few years afterwards; in the process growing from a fevered mass of serpentine voices and low-fi death-hammering through skin and string toward a latently melodic and drawn-out sound. Ten years later, Livari returned to complete work on the band’s unfinished record, Faustian Dreams. Symphonic, labored, and pitiably carrying-on for nine tracks, Black Crucifixion sleaze their way back into the fold with a strange meld of Celtic Frost, Iron Maiden, and Type-O-Negative, mixing sunken melodic repetition with brighter gallops and incomprehensible keyboard pieces to round out the platter. In each, the faint remnant of those more promising efforts can still be heard; the present disc being no mystery itself, only the awkward conclusion of hiatus which also appears a weaker version of another Livari project: the overblown Prog-Metal group Promethean (his painfully “erotic” tones sounding uncomfortably gastric, or else just poorly mimicking Tom Warrior). Even if the value of compounding that early sound a decade afterwards remains in debate, through their latest incarnation, we know for sure that Black Crucifixion are now completely irrelevant.
[Todd DePalma]
Black Crucifixion
Faustian Dreams
2006
Paragon
http://www.paragonrecords.net
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