Sargeist
Satanic Black Devotion

This is for all those who tried to kill the spirit of Black Metal; for all those who thought they could extinguish the Black Flame once and for all; for the deluded who, in their folly, try to erect the tombstone of the most extreme genre ever existed, engraving the date "August 10, 1993."

To all of them, this album can be dedicated, like the hammer that, in the year 2003, came crashing down from Finland on all their absurd hopes. A hammer wielded by a group then semi-unknown, but whose starting credentials were excellent. The underground depths had already been shaken by the demo "Heralding Breath Of Pestilence," and by the first album, whose production was limited to only 500 copies, "Tyranny Returns." And, on the other hand, less was not to be expected, considering the backgrounds of the project members. Apart from the drummer Horns, on his first professional engagement, taking care of vocals, guitar, and bass were Shatraug and Torog, members respectively of Horna and Behexen, two of the most established groups of the Scandinavian scene.

Skillfully mixing feral atmospheres and Nordic chill, ruinous fury, and a dreamy melancholy, profound hatred and desolating misanthropy, Sargeist gave birth to "Satanic Black Devotion," one of the best chapters in the contemporary history of Black Metal. The peculiarity of the compositions does not lie in the innovation of traditional canons, but in their studied reiteration and reinterpretation, starting above all with the lyrics, free from the ideological or philosophical commitment common to many modern bands, and centered on the impressions reported from the sick and depressed interiority of the authors in contact with the cold North. Regarding artistic adjustments, Sargeist extremizes the search for coexistence between fury and melody, reaching the point of combining blast beats and acoustic parts, in a unique solution with depressive connotations, and exacerbates the concept of voice as coverage, typical of Finnish BM, such that in some tracks, the chorus consists merely of guitar chords, whose expressiveness perfectly replaces the singing.

The opening of this masterpiece is entrusted to "Preludium", an intro with leaden and oppressive accents, tasked with creating an atmosphere in which the first track "Satanic Black Devotion" fits perfectly. A frantic drum, in which features indebted to the true Norwegian are easily recognizable, accompanies a funerary riff with a depressive flavor, repeating for several rounds in an increasing darkness. It is the vocal entry that perfectly crowns this beginning: a drawn-out scream, classic but fascinating, wrapped in a malign echo, recites its morbid chant exalting with its height the gloomy rumble intertwined with bass and guitar, which modulates its darkness with simple but frequent riffing changes, longing to reach the emotional peak of the piece.
The voice falls silent: the howl of the bass sings, marking with its lugubrious, frantic tolling the melancholic arpeggio of the guitar. The style flaunted by this excellent opener remains unchanged with subsequent pieces.

Only in "Glorification" does the musical structure undergo a change in a malign sense, confirmed in "Panzergod", and culminating in the violent "Black Fucking Murder". There is no introduction to this track; its uncontainable fury does not allow it. A grating scream overlaps the ultra-fast blast beats, highlighting the funeral, obsessive guitar loops, which almost immediately lead to a brutal chorus, this time accompanied by the voice, which is the protagonist, and which does not allow the minimal but melodic riffs to make the piece less harrowing. The rhythmic sequence resumes a very high pace, with a structure similar to the first seconds of the song, but varies almost immediately without vocal accompaniment, producing a simple but strongly emotional guitar run, whose pronounced nostalgic accents seem to try to unravel the sensation of oppression permeating the entire piece, only succeeding in highlighting its gloom. The track closes with a strong acceleration that leaves no room for musical delicacies.

After this superb track, one might believe that Sargeist have given their best, and that the subsequent "Sargeist" is just a filler track. You are wrong. It is here that the group's expressive power reaches its poignant peak, with black depressive tones, which nonetheless have nothing to envy to Darkthrone's "Transilvanian Hunger" in terms of integrity of traditional canons. The opening riff possesses an incredible melancholic charge, while preserving its extreme violence, over which the voice, more malign than ever before, inserts itself, an echo that seems to come from another world. The drums lash without mercy the sound scheme with a tormenting burst of blast beats, dictating rules over the timing changes, to which Shatraug's six funeral strings respond with leaden solutions in a crescendo, prelude to what I dare say is one of the best guitar passages in Black Metal history. The voice is silent. A feral, moving in its decadence arpeggio loosens the tones, evoking with masterful power a deadly chill, a bleeding despair, an unbearable pain, a devastating hatred. And while the echoes of this sublime weave, too short to be fully savored, still bite the senses, the uncontainable ferocity of the drums breaks the musical structure, restoring the initial riff, which returns even more fierce, even more desperate. A cruel scream assails the instrumental part.

The lugubrious succession of tones once again produces gloomy, chilling evolutions, until reaching again what the melody itself, with its cry, yearns for. Again the superb chorus, again a sick journey into the most hidden recesses of the mind where hate and pain nestle, again an intensity too brief, leaving a listener stunned by the violence of the musical scheme. The path repeats, but where the guitars have their last, hissing spasm, which the ear believes preludes to the chorus, a structure cadenced by the lugubrious tolling of the double bass drum inserts itself, over which a wearisome, obsessive riff unfolds, dragging a feverish voice, in an atmosphere of mortal desolation. The acceleration that fits onto a sudden scream, which seemed unable to be born from the previous hiss, is unexpected, chilling. The longed-for arpeggio breaks in, furious and melancholic, enriched by acoustic notes that adorn its bitter nuances. To explicate its effect is impossible. The subsequent, angry acceleration seems to come from a distance of centuries.

"Sargeist" thus closes, investing with its funeral aura everything around.
"...through sadness and depression I awoke in the stone-cold grave..."