Negura Bunget
Virstele Pamintului

Here it is finally, after various reprints for the lupus lounge of the first untraceable and still raw works of the band, the successor to the much-acclaimed "om" of 2006, an album that had amazed quite a few industry insiders.

I must be honest, I wasn't expecting much from this group anymore, after two-thirds of the lineup left the group, specifically Hupogrammos and sol faur, leaving the helm to just Negru, drummer and the only founding member left; a departure that made me fear the worst, and perhaps because I had prepared myself for it, this latest work of theirs seems so beautiful and moving to me.

Keeping OM in mind, I insert the disc into the player and find myself catapulted once again into that peculiar environment that only they manage to create, that blend of mysticism, folklore, darkness, power, decay, surreal psychedelia for which only they seem to hold the keys.

I don't want to talk about one track over another, because it is so compact and indivisible that it is very challenging for me; compared to its predecessor, the general feeling is of a wise hardening of the sound, a more than marked decrease of those prog-like parts that appeared here and there in the previous work: more direct if you will, even more concentrated on the overall atmosphere of the work rather than of the individual track as occurred in the 2006 work, and just where the latter proved a bit difficult to assimilate and demanding to listen to due to its strong experimental drive, "Virstele Pamintului" shows itself to be more linear, smooth, direct as previously said, without any hitches (not that the predecessor had any, but as mentioned before, it lost clarity due to bold and unpredictable experimentation), indeed full of that compactness that makes a work great and at times truly takes your breath away.

This general simplification does not affect by a milligram the magic that these black metal heralds know how to infuse in our hearts, indeed it further enhances those wonderfully expressed parts by folkloric instruments that so vividly draw in the mind those desolate and quietly sinister lands of Romania, their hometown for those who didn't know.

Black metal we said, surreal, sometimes psychedelic, ambient, folkloric, full of naturalistic magic.

Negura are back, changed in spirit, but not in form, still advancing their proposition by another notch, this time impacting the experimental side a little in favor of the emotional one.

Wonderfully magical!