Band: Cult Of Erinyes
Title: A Place To Call My Unknown
Label: Les Acteurs De L’Ombre
Distribution: xxx
Release date: April 23rd 2011
Review: CD

Cult of Erinyes hail from Brussels, Belgium, and they (Baal, Corvus and Mastema) are a side-project of Psalm; the latter being a fantastic formation performing deadly and thrashy Black Musick. Recommended stuff: Manifest (Genet Records, 2008, their supreme second full album).
After a mini-recording, A Place To Call My Unknown is the debut full length, recorded at the Blackout Multimedia Studio with Emptiness / Hybrid Viscery / Enthroned’s Phorgath. This one did the final mix for 2008’s splendid Aguynguerran-album Perverting The Nazarene Cult as well, for example.
What strikes me as from the first moment is the sound: GRIM! Damn, what a thick, sulphuric fog, what a haunting, suffocative and obscure atmosphere… It does make you attentive immediately.
The concrete fundaments on A Place To Call My Unknown are based on mainly fast and hammering riffs and rhythms, including a wide variety on tempos (balancing between funereal doomish and blasting). It does come with a post-modern Old Style-approach, being ritualistic and oppressive, organic and abyssal.
The compositions come with a rather original inventiveness, even though this album does not redefine the scene. Not only the addition of soundscapes, intros and outros, or ambient intermezzos does color the whole in blackest black; the wayward performance too is unique. This goes for instruments and vocals, both of them being worked out carefully, with massive persuasive compositions as result. It does not matter if it dwells in suicidal, torturous or warlike spheres; without exception, all hymns are of undeniable excellence, poisoning one’s mind with both masochistic and sadistic visions…
It really is a pleasure to listen to this album again and again.
Required material for fans of Blood Of Kingu, Mortifera, Behexen, Glorior Belli, Nadiwrath, Hate Forest or Necros Christos.

92/100

Ivan Tibos.