Orcrist
We Come In War

Talking about Orcrist is never an easy task; there are people who love them to madness and follow each of their releases religiously, while others simply consider them clowns. In these cases, the truth can only lie somewhere in between.

Orcrist is an Italian musical project created and carried on by a character named Grav, a drummer with very limited technical and compositional skills. The intentions of this individual and his project are very clear and declared; to propose a mentally closed True Black Metal, stylistically pure and possibly recorded in an indecent manner. Practically, an absolute purist of the genre, who states without mincing words that the only possible Black Metal is the one that is not evolved, not contaminated, identical to twenty years ago, and recorded in a basement with a barrage of execution errors, because only in this way can it be truly called "true," the rest, as per his words, is "all gay stuff!". Such statements are debatable, made by Grav today, but they were originated in the early '90s in the Norwegian Black Metal scene when certain stances had symbolic value and were not very different from those made in '77 in the London of the Sex Pistols. Obviously, statements like these in 2012, especially made by a band like Orcrist, born at the dawn of the new millennium, are useless and harmful, as well as ridiculous.

As written earlier, Grav is a drummer, so to bring Orcrist's works to life, he avails different musicians each time, often recruited from the deepest underground. "We Come in War" album marked 2009 makes no exception; it features Sacrifice (vocalist of Moring Soul) on vocals and Mane (a multi-instrumentalist in multiple ultra-underground projects) on bass and guitar.

Spending too many words on an album like this would be useless and harmful since it is simply pure Black Metal played in a style that's at least fifteen years old, performed rather sloppily and with some downright embarrassing drum parts. Honestly, I don't see why one would purchase this album, as there are thousands of bands like this saturating the market with such trash, if one wants to listen to something like this, it's always better to turn to the historical groups that have this label precisely because they played this genre in unassuming times, unfortunately inspiring thousands of musicians without personality.

However, a note must be made: this "We Come in War" is probably the best album in Orcrist's entire discography, indeed the session musicians who collaborated for the recording of this release are probably the best who have ever collaborated with Grav, for after churning out six useless tracks something changes and surprises; namely the concluding track "The Silence" which is undeniably a beautiful piece, probably due to the lineup that played on this album, since something like this had never happened in Orcrist's past, this is without a doubt a note of merit that demonstrates a step forward, albeit small, that prevents me from giving "We Come in War" the lowest rating.

I recommend listening to this album only to the 100% pure Black Metal fetishists to whom I also say that the lyrics were written by Goblin, the leader of Isvind, a Norwegian cult band.