Black Lodge
Covet

LA RECENSIONE

Metalcore, funereal doom and a sweet female voice. Has no one ever proposed such a sonic combination? False! In the early '90s, if the trend imposed a model of gothic and tearful doom, someone tried to deviate from the formula by proposing a well-balanced, fascinating, and unusual fusion of the aforementioned styles.

I'm talking about Black Lodge, a Norwegian act founded and driven by musicians of whom we know almost nothing. Just one album, no live appearances, and no follow-up, even under a different guise, to that magnificent yet ambitious project.

Released by Head Not Found (the label of the early, and equally brilliant, The 3rd And The Mortal), the first and only creation of Black Lodge is destined to shake the foundations of the darkest metal, and it is evidence of how many innovative and revolutionary bands are often hastily archived.

If you take the sound of Paradise Lost and mix it with a touch of hardcore, maybe you can understand a little more. If you can combine it all with the sweetness of a voice like Kari Rueslatten’s and a peculiar low growl that doesn't always align with the death metal lesson/tradition, well, it means you've perfectly understood what "Covet" is capable of!

But words, and mine in particular, are not enough to describe the innovative charge and brilliance that distinguished and still distinguishes this LP. Rugged and dissonant guitars, slow and suffocating drums. Very long, stretched-out tracks, real "slow-motion films" accompanied by occasional metalcore-limit outbursts, and as if it weren’t enough, spleen in abundance.

The female voice, even in the case of Black Lodge, doesn't give life to the classic "beauty & the beast metal" but to something unusual and profoundly unconventional.

So I ask myself/you: why so much indifference towards such a fresh product? It may not be the best record that the genre has offered us, true, but how much unwarranted indifference there is towards it!

These are the meteors to be rediscovered. These are the artists who, in anonymity, dared and experimented.