Endless Blizzard - Remember Your Death
October 5 2008 at 11:35:44 PM
That Rorsach’s a one-man Black Metal “band,” right? To-get-things-right-you-must-do- them-yourself ostensibly still holds true for Metal’s most unrepentantly mopey and misanthropic sub-genre. Mostly contrived nonetheless, the “loner” behind the curtain persists as one-man-wrecking-crew, a sort of composer and orchestra and self-promotion machine. California’s Endless Blizzard remarkably eschews commercial preen ‘n’ pomp, conspicuously boasting meager releases: Two demos – the earliest dating back to ’97, a split, and this year’s
Remember Your Death. Amidst pointless merch clogging engaged by nearly every artist boasting an unintelligible band logo, Endless Blizzard turns tail, glomming onto ideal: measured, polished release. Fucking novel idea as far as eight miles the crow flies.
Yes, restraint works. Most rivetheads will find little reason to not connect Roskva’s Endless Blizzard with Wrest’s Leviathan – or any other “ambitious” Metal project for that matter. The two certainly share a love for Tom G. Warrior. But who doesn’t? And zee Petah und der Vulf keys – Thanks, Varg – are rather transparent. What’s sacrificed in nuance is gained in counterpoint. These “epic”
Sturm und Drang clots are palpably genuine – able transliterations of Black Metal’s most pilfered source material: See Wagner. Plenty of bombast and lyrical chiaroscuro; little to no unfocused statement, impotent jawing, chest-beating schtick: the Bedroom Black Metal scene may be inherently bogus, and understandably omnipresent. But at least there’s one amongst them that can convincingly pull off a track like “Buried Still Breathing/Remember Your Death,” a deceptively minimal piece replete with beatifically numbing guitar outro, which spans the locus of aboriginal and Egyptian death rite, the sort of primeval vade mecum to the afterlife. Charon ain’t always willing to row to oblivion, ya dig?
[Stewart Voegtlin]
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