Carpathian Forest
Black Shine Later

It was 1998. He was a rather strange man, a lover of extreme metal, obsessed with suicide, so frequent in his country, a bit of a fool and veeeery misanthropic. And it was a Carpathian Forest: it was "Black Shine Later".

It was actually the advent of a band destined to make its way through the darkest and sickest depths of black metal. The true essence of Carpathian Forest was all there, in that black disc with the sparse cover and killer tracks. Not a bad idea from the group: starting from the assumption of being all lovers of the thrash metal scene (whether German or American) and perhaps even more of the dark scene (Cure and Bauhaus above all), in those '90s our guys decided (the first release is from '95) to bring these two musical passions together into a proposal that could simultaneously express the most complete filth and negativity of the human soul as such, misanthropy, pain, hatred, depression; all with an ironic and oppressive verve. To give light to what they had in mind, they used a genre that could not yield to any compromise, if they used it the way they intended: black metal. Here is the reality. What Carpathian Forest decided to play was Norwegian black metal heavily influenced by the sacred monsters post-Venom/Bathory, with a production so clean that it further highlighted the filth (it's not a contradiction, don't worry), combining it with terribly thrash riffs and dark, obsessive, and downright morbid atmospheres.

Nattefrost grants no pauses, takes no prisoners, makes no statements. He does his dirty work and that's it, he screams and destroys. And when the invocation "Black Shine Later" enters the ears, it remains there, it's there now, you can't stop it anymore. You can't. The group's "blackened" thrash metal drags whirlwindly, resounds, oppresses. Granitic riffs alternate with bass lines with a dark flavor, a sick and visceral decadence, scenarios of apocalypse and despair. It's nihilism, it's the loss of certainty. Sudden accelerations willingly give way to long, exhausting, distorted arpeggios. Acoustic guitars insert themselves uninvited, providing a background to the tearing distortions. Nattefrost's voice kills, it seems like he's vomiting his soul to spit it on the microphone. It's hard to tell if the guitar wants to be angry or simply ironic. In short, Carpathian Forest's music is nothing more than a new way of understanding and playing black metal, a new way of relating to negativity. And to further highlight this, just note the last track of the album, the marvelous "A Forest", which is the cover of the best song by the Cure.

I don't think I'm far off the mark when I say that "Black Shine Later", besides being the masterpiece of the Norwegian band, deserves to enter the pantheon of classic black, maybe just below, but still close to works like "Pure Holocaust", "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas", "A Blaze in Northern Sky" and "Nemesis Divina". Hymns to Satan and Nazi marches serve no purpose, it is necessary to analyze the unconscious more deeply, to root out evil from the soul to exorcise it, it's not enough to just put it there on display. And maybe Carpathian Forest understood this.