Xasthur
A Gate Through Bloodstained Mirrors 2CD

THE REVIEW

For some time now, I've felt a sort of attraction towards those black bands that have made a depressive, sick, and very personal sound their musical offering. In my hunger for gloom, I obviously couldn't resist this new reissue from the best band in this field: Xasthur, which I had already listened to in more recent works like "Subliminal Genocide" and "Defective Epitaph".

It's an elegant yet sparse packaging that contains the early efforts of the Californian artist, represented here, as always, by a magnificent cover that deceives without giving away the contents of the now-unobtainable demo "A Darkened Winter" and the EP "A Gate Through Bloodstained Mirrors", enriched with the addition of other unreleased material like a cover of Burzum and one from the French Mutiilation. And indeed, the proposal of our artist sits between these two bands that have made black metal history, along with a few other privileged ones. Here are the first hints of the sound that from those years onwards has haunted our dreams. A sound not sparse and minimal, but symphonic and baroque in its variety, which, however, only a frequent listener can notice.

Tracks on the edge of Funeral doom, accompanied by gloomy and annoying keyboards, Malefic's voice emerges from a layer of oblique and dazed sounds. This double album flows slowly through our subconscious, masterfully alternating horror ambient with more typically black-oriented tracks. All driven by an impalpable anguish, permeating every track, creating an inner discomfort that doesn't fade even after pressing, exhausted, the stop button on your stereo.

After many listens, I personally still can't quite grasp the immense depression evoked by this man, who seems aware of the emotions he knows how to evoke, and in his damned world, he delights in making us listeners feel what he has felt in his head for a lifetime: a sea of emotional pain and hysterical crises. Listening to the album distractedly, the tracks seem to overlap and chain together, the guitars rot, and everything decays. It's at that point that I recommend a swift escape because the black spirit of Xasthur is slowly but inexorably overwhelming you, to insinuate in your mind the malignant thought of a sweet suicide...