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The Black metal scene, just like the Death scene, is now saturated: swarms of bands, more or less valid, crowd around the same goal, namely to create the most extreme and uncompromising musical product. Over time, however, the need to open new paths has become increasingly clear, to try something new to evolve sounds that ossify on themselves: in this context, there are those who try contaminations with other genres and those who instead delve into the same in other directions.
Undoubtedly the one man band Leviathan (not to be confused with their Turkish and Swedish namesakes), the “monster” of Californian Wrest, belongs to this category and develops the most authentically gloomy side of Black. Similar groups have reached such a number to earn their own definition, that of “depressive black”, a movement started by the infamous Varg Vikernes, i.e., Burzum, and continued by many others, among which I mention the German project Nargaroth, our own Forgotten Tomb, the German duo Forgotten Woods, and the Australian Abyssic Hate (the last two, groups of which I will soon provide a review).
Leviathan perhaps comes closest to Nargaroth and Burzum, who are themselves closer to raw black, but removes the so-called “pagan” component of which the aforementioned are flagbearers, not only on a thematic level but also on a sonic one. Undeniably, the product (published by Moribund Records in 2003) that emerges is very interesting even though (as is obvious) devoid of technical virtuosity and daring experimentation: our analyst, it must be said, nonetheless shows remarkable creativity in producing a series of riffs as beautiful as they are chilling and in skillfully programming the drum machine.
As I was saying earlier, the repertoire from which Wrest draws is undoubtedly that of the roughest and most relentless black, but he endows it with depressive and distressing atmospheres: alongside the typical rhythms of the most violent rides in “Norwegian black metal style,” we thus find alienating and anguished guitar parts, the product of a tormented soul on the brink of emotional disaster. The rhythms are syncopated, staggering, while on the contrary, the riffs follow one another with the subversive continuity of a river in full flow, dragging the poor listener into a whirlpool with no way out.
Indeed, the album in question has the ability to shatter good humor and leave a sense of bitterness even in the most cheerful optimists: what amazes is that it doesn't do so through a melancholic and tragic atmosphere (like many black doom bands à la Dolorian) but with a very sinister atmosphere of inner turmoil aided by a production that perfectly matches the proposal (dirty and very confused). An exemplary song, in my opinion, is “He Whom Shadow Moves Toward”, which I consider the best of the album (also because perhaps it is the one that feels the influences of raw black the least, a genre I find fairly challenging): it indeed manages to perfectly combine the dragging vortex of emotional pain with other more decadent and measured pieces. If you try inserting on top of all this a heavily filtered voice shifting from the most classic screaming to screams that seem like the lament of damned souls, you will understand that the result is a true Dantean journey into the depths of the human mind.
The only flaw of the album, if we want to call it that, is that to fully appreciate it one must be in a state of mind that I wouldn’t wish on anyone; such an atmosphere can only be fully understood by those living through a difficult emotional situation, by those who love to wallow in the spiral of suffering and live their lives as if they were about to end within a few minutes. Even if such a person did not happen to "accidentally" (in an Aristotelian sense) suffer at that precise moment, listening to just one song would be enough to plunge them back into the usual state. On the contrary, for those who generally live not so much a peaceful as at least a controlled life, this CD will represent nothing more than the excellent musical creation of a disturbed mind. Representing, together with the subsequent “Tentacles Of Whorror,” one of the few complete chapters in Leviathan's discography (the other works are a sort of ocean of Split, Demo, and Mini CDs), it can only deserve the highest marks: those with a more fragile sensitivity will find in this album a sweet poison, capable of generating as much pain as fascination…
“Infin che‘l mar fu sopra noi richiuso”…
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