Therion
Beyond Sanctorum

There was a time when album covers more or less precisely suggested what you would be listening to once the needle was set on the black vinyl.

Despite owning this record for ages and ages, I have never adequately reflected on the depiction presented on the cover of the second baroque and neoromantic LP by Therion, marked as anno domini 1992.

It looks like an ugly cover and indeed it is, but by analyzing it rationally, one can notice that the massive and dark presence of grim clouds is threatened by the gushing sunlight, which seems almost hidden and minor, yet it appears to be able to overcome its surroundings.

As if to say: what you are about to listen to will be a classic black massacre but amidst all this darkness, there will be sudden, unexpected flashes of light, creativity, and hope.

For such a learned chromatic analysis, I realize that it takes quite a bit of imagination, or having guzzled down six jugs of Cannonau consecutively.
In my case, the former prevailed: Cannonau is not recommended for breakfast.

We are in the presence of a pure distillate of raw Viking sentimentality, even though the underground and lugubrious catacombic root is to be found in the well-regarded Switzerland of the good Thomas G. Warrior.

The Swedish-deathsters Therion before becoming a sub-branch of the Circo Medrano, always made people laugh yet at least played wildly and boorishly in an appropriate and convincing manner.

It is not known whether their comicality is voluntary or not: it was revealed to me in the Lower Pleistocene thanks to a snippet of a period interview in which they boasted of boiling in a special cauldron not the ancient Viking recipe of pork rinds with beans but the instrument strings before mounting and thoroughly abusing them in the recording studio.

Indeed, it just escapes me whether the slow-cooking of strings has become a consolidated practice among the deathsters of sunny Scandinavia and whether this influenced the scene and the final result, in any case, the track that kicks off the album, "Future Consciousness", where the array of blinding atrocities expressed literally splits the mountains near Stockholm in two: if you go look today, indeed, it's all flat land around there.

Not to mention (but yes, let's mention it) the troglodytic "Illusions of Life" filled with delightful UH! scattered grossly here and there.
That dripping tangle of Celtic ice mixed with tears, blood, and boiling black pitch remains indelible for anyone whose ears are occluded and lined with tungsten.

(Re)tasting records of this kind highlights, in case there was a need, the nearly absolute mediocrity and lack of perspective present today in the varied world of more or less extreme metal globally.

Translated from Swedish:
"Beyond Sanctorum" represents the peak, the acme, the summit, the pinnacle, the vertex, the zenith, the climax, as well as their compositional/executive apogee: nevertheless, one of the greatest examples of Metallo della Muerte from the end of the millennium originating from the ancient continent.

Immediately after this tortuous and voluptuous work, the vocalist and leader maximo mercilessly ousted his partners in misfortune with the tactical plan to cube quadruple the formation elements; this progressively compromised the quality of the proposal but at the same time allowed him to set up the multifaceted circus that has come down to our days.

UH!