RSS Feed


BLACK CURSE
Burning In Celestial Poison

Sepulchral Voice (2024)
Rating: 9/10

As if the burning and bloody pits of Hell have opened their gates and been spewed onto the sleazy streets of Earth, so Denver, Colorado-based Black Curse makes another frightening entrance with their second full-length album.

Spilling forth like some boiling liquefied mass of stinking lava, Burning In Celestial Poison epitomises all that is despicable about this unhinged mob of midnight marauders. If you thought debut outing Endless Wound was an unnerving furnace of scalding black-death then wait until you hear this molten slab of madness. Five tracks, three of which run for over ten minutes, Burning In Celestial Poison taps into the most tormented depths of crimson Hell, prodding the abyss of the crazed psyche as if it were some tumultuous hallucinogenic administered to conjure the foulest of billowing demons.

Through every sinew and pore, Black Curse leaks and gushes with rancid, sulphuric aplomb. An amalgamation of infernal screams, bubbling tributaries and scorching oozing erupt in a volcano of violence, the end result being something so deeply red, so darkly black and sickly subterranean. ‘Spleen Girt With Serpent’ is summed up by one bestial line: “Blackest fires fill my lungs so that I might exhale noxious plumes”. And there you have it; the one belching epiphany exulted through dense, charcoal walls of cloying vapour and clogging satanic silt.

Black Curse scrapes the bottomless barrel of choking evil, coughing up the 12-minute toxic fog of ‘Trodden Flesh’, another miasma of suffocating horror which rages like a flamethrower. Such musical landscapes are unearthly, primitive and utterly demonic while completely unwavering in their formula of black riff walls, malicious dense percussive gloop within which horrible, reverberating gasps exist.

Bands such as Spain’s Teitanblood spring to mind, but this abomination, although simple, is thicker in its smoke, and less inviting. In fact, as each track announces itself there’s something non-musical about it all as bloody clumps of grinding war metal conflict with the oxidized sediment of war metal. Even so, this is a far deeper exploration than on the last record because here Black Curse operates in such an obscure and vile furnace pantheon that with each spin I seem to withdraw from its tar depths.

It’ll take a brave person to navigate the vast inferno created here. When track titles become irrelevant you know you’re in for quite a harrowing adventure as those prolonged maniacal grates clatter away at the edge of those remote hellfires. “We ravenously devour the white coats of your smouldering life,” are the veiled, sizzling words of despair which slither from closing behemoth ‘Flowers Of Gethsemane’.

Everything that exists here is deeply entrenched, burrowed into blackness and blasphemy. With each cacophonous passage Black Curse seem to bore further into the core of the Earth, leaving behind them a disgusting soot trail of charred depravity. Somehow Burning In Celestial Poison is frighteningly unique, a maelstrom of flaring chaos, and my views of it are through closed eyelids so as to not become singed by its gargantuan grotesque glare.

Neil Arnold

<< Back to Album & EP Reviews



Related Posts via Categories
Share