By John Bedard
Sometimes when you grab a beer you want a complex craft beer with a lot of different flavor notes to explore and identify. For many, like myself, this can be an almost obsession. You want to keep challenging your pallet and finding things you had not before. Not every time though. Sometimes you just crave a generic beer. For me, this tends to be past blue ribbon. It is not some fancy IPA or stout that demands all of your attention. It is just a damn good beer and there is nothing wrong with that. The same is true with music. ‘Maher Shalal Hash Baz’ is not groundbreaking it is not experimenting with anything we have not heard before. It is, however, a damn good black metal album and sometimes that is exactly what you are craving.
‘Maher Shalal Hash Baz’ starts ominously, as it should, with dark environmental sounds that quickly build into the heavy dark guitar and drums we love so much from the genre. I love the tone they have gone with for the guitars. It is dark and gritty but with plenty of mid-range dialed in making sure that the tone never becomes muddy or lost in the mix. Instead, the mix is put together very well. Nothing is overpowering. The drums and bass all are dialled in perfectly to complement one another.
The vocals are brutal. The depth of the growl is dark and unsettling. Much more of a fry than other bands here it is turned up to a point that wonderfully complements the tone of the instruments. However, a couple of times the vocal style changes to clean sung segments that have an almost gothic tone that brings to mind old abandoned cathedrals weathered with time and neglect. I know that is is extremely cryptic but the feeling is more emotional than anything else it is very difficult to put into words clearer than what I just said but it is well worth experiencing for yourself.
When it is all said and done, this is a fantastic example of black metal. It does not redefine the genre but instead takes the best things about it and does it well. I do think this is one that absolutely deserves your time and I do think that without it your collection would be missing out. Like I was saying in the beginning sometimes you just want a decent example of something great brought down to basics. This is that. It might not be that fancy IPA that they only release 42 bottles of once a year. This is just a damn good beer that you can just enjoy and there is nothing wrong with that, nothing at all.
- ‘Maher Shalal Hash Baz’ is released this Thursday (31 October). You can get your copy HERE.
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