Band: Urfaust
Title: IX: Einsiedler
Label: Ván Records
Distribution: Candelight Records
Release date: 07/08/2009
Review: MCD

The Dutch formation Urfaust, with (former / session) members of e.g. Gauhaert, Galgeras, Zwartketterij etc, did release several highly appreciated underground recordings throughout the past five years, bringing a sombre mixture of Ambient and Doom-Black Metal. The new mini-album IX: Einsiedler, consisting of only two songs, goes on in the vein of the former material.
The first track, the title track, lasts for twelve (!) minutes and combines floating and ambient keyboards with slow, droning and repetitive drums and bass, low-tuned guitars, a few grim blackish screams and raw, epic clean vocals. But these last one might be not that pure all the time??? The melancholic end of this song comes with a more psychedelic approach with late sixties / early seventies-alike keyboard lines and a neo-progressive rhythm section. The sound is extremely dry and dusty, giving the atmosphere a noisy and industrialised touch.
Verderber, the second hymn (almost seven minutes of length), is a cold, grim and winterly underground Black Metal track with a burzumesk blackish voice, Funeral Doom / Suicidal Black-riffs and rhythm-changes, and the addition of Noise within sound and structure. The primitive approach exhales, in a modest way, a painful purity with a tribute-pleasure to the Nordic old school.

86/100

Ivan Tibos.