Samael
Passage

THE REVIEW

The little-known Samael, a Swiss band, would require a whole encyclopedia to be fully and properly described. All the pieces in their discography, starting from the seminal and violent "Worship Him," "Blood Ritual," and especially "Ceremony of Opposites," are each the antithesis of the next, and it's no joke.
Labeled as the eternal "bad guys" and "blasphemous" due to their catacomb-like and suffocating attitude toward Black Metal music, with this "Passage," they indeed found themselves making a "passage" in the true sense of the word, between their origins and the future contaminations that would culminate in the massive and praised "Reign of Light," of which this album already allows one to breathe in deeply the sick, claustrophobic, evil, and hopeless atmospheres of the Samael project.

In short, the result is quite astonishing. Samael has been one of the few bands of all time to evolve their sound without selling out too much but instead making it darker and increasingly extreme, while not showing it overtly, nor allowing it to seep clearly into the granite grooves of this work which, according to the author, is undoubtedly a theatrical example and never lacking in ideas when it comes to the sensations and negative vibrations it emanates.
Listening to it, one immediately feels uneasy, without necessarily being attacked by a wall of sound and violence for its own sake. None of this: Samael are perfidious and atrocious, but they do it with great class and extraordinary compositional flair, much like, to use an antiphon, the early Slasher Movies of the '80s where there was very little blood but all the characters, all the shots were permeated by that sick and frightening feeling that managed to bewilder so effectively.

Even the choice of the evolutionary path that Samael embarked upon (the "Industrial" one, just to clarify) lends itself well to the intent they set, therefore.
Impress and procrastinate without making it obvious, but instead enveloping it all in daring and synchronized sound parts that move in a fluctuating manner between technological nightmares and formless white lights of the operating room and deep, dizzying starry cosmogonies, landscapes violated by the cold moonlight and cries and sufferings and boundless anger, which dangerously slither through these eleven songs, to be listened to compulsory at night, indoors, perhaps in the dark, maybe reading some H. P. Lovecraft story (which, incidentally, is also a great source of inspiration for the band itself).
And you will have no escape.

You will understand it right from the first track "Rain", with its rock-solid and systematic guitar riffs giving way, though not imploding over them, to keyboards that instead of lightening the atmosphere, make it darker and as black as pitch. I say it with all sincerity, even if the rest of this album were discardable, it would still deserve to be purchased solely for this song.
The drum machine must have been programmed by someone accustomed to working with a crusher, so powerful and visceral it is, Vorphalack's voice seems to intone evocations to some deity from the universal chaos, Xytras's guitar strikes blow after blow, indifferent to the sonic oppression and desolate icy land it drags behind, and the whole musical section in general ignites with a searing yet icy fire, which, as you close your eyes, violently flings the listener into never-imagined purgatories, though perceivable nevertheless.

Fortunately, or rather unfortunately, there isn't just one valid and engaging track; rather, all, with their different aspects, are of the highest and most elegant level; and this wouldn't be a review of an album destined to make the history of sonic contamination if I didn't at least mention "Angel's Deceit", "Jupiterian Vibe", and "Liquid Soul Dimension". But it's just for the sake of information that I mention them since the material, I reiterate, has an impressive and enormously captivating depth in its entirety.
I can speak in a representative manner, and I can tell you about the caustic atmospheres that, for example, "Jupiterian Vibe" evokes, with its tribal attack and the clarity of its images then, or the inhuman precision with which "The Ones Who Came Before" is executed, or the melodic and growling airiness of "Moonskin", or, finally, the frightened and annihilated flight of the predestined victim, in the moonlight, who runs terrified and pursued by the serial killer of the moment, as can clearly and magnificently be perceived in "A Man in Your Head". I could tell you many other things, but the encyclopedia is tedious to read, so I can only advise you to acquire this gem, listen to it for a while, set it aside, listen to something else that comes close to it, and then pick it up again, if only to humble at least a thousand other bands, all busy thinking they are "evil" and "blasphemous," but who do not have even a millionth of the genius, insight, complexity of the lyrics, and technical skills of Samael.

Hell is no longer at the gates.