Antestor
Martyrium

Having become famous within the "underground" metal scene for being, alongside their Australian peers Horde, one of the most celebrated bands in the so-called Christian black metal scene, Antestor took their first steps in the musical world back in 1994. Influenced by the great black metal bands, they decided to release their first album "Martyrium".
Far from the excellent results achieved in later years, this "Martyrium" is quite a peculiar album for the band because, while on one hand it draws heavily from the Norwegian black metal tradition adding here and there thrash rhythms and melodic openings, it is perhaps the only album where Antestor truly manages to express contrasting feelings of love/hate. The lyrics are more focused on themes and questions concerning the sinful and evil nature of man, rather than purely Christian reflections, which would become more developed in the following years.
Musically, the album presents itself as quite bare, devoid of melodic searches and instrumental refinements, instead aiming to be as direct as possible with often fast and simple rhythms, square riffs, never too elaborate, mostly based on a small number of chords that obsessively revolve throughout the tracks. Compared to the band's latest productions, one cannot help but notice a significantly heavy debt even to a certain depressive doom tinged with "melodic" openings and pachydermic drum passages that make the various songs even more cadenced (a shining example of this is "Inmost Fear", definitely difficult to digest).
Among the best moments of the album, it's impossible not to mention "Depressed", opened by a delicate piano intro that accompanies Martyr's ungraceful voice that moves from baritone tones to powerful and precise screams. The piece moves entirely on the clean/scream vocal juxtaposition, always supported by highly effective guitar lines, making it perhaps the only episode close to what would later become the band's standards.
The splendid "Martyrium" title-track of very short duration, not even three minutes, featuring highly fascinating melodic intertwine where acoustic guitar and piano parts coexist with decidedly more driven electric parts, with the always identical melodic loops creating a sense of obsessiveness.
Less convincing are the parts where the band lets themselves get carried away by the thrash tradition, resulting most of the time slightly awkward and confusing in the writing of the melodies, mostly basing the rhythmic section only on speed, which does not contribute to a sense of disorder in the music.
What can be perceived when listening to this album is certainly a sense of "uncompleted" work and a certain compositional immaturity; nevertheless, pleasant moments can be found, and if you manage to overlook a not-so-clean recording (often appreciated within the black metal scene) and the aforementioned flaws, you will still have the opportunity to listen to a reasonably satisfactory album on the whole.