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THE GAUNTLET
Dark Steel And Fire

Eternal Death / Nihil Verim Nisi Mors Productions (2023)
Rating: 7.5/10

After featuring on two split projects and releasing an EP – War And Guilt – in 2020, New Jersey-based one man band The Gauntlet latches onto your face and separates flesh from bone with this scuzzy debut full-length offering. Don’t be put off by the poor, cartoon cover art, this is a seriously nefarious and wretched cauldron of blackness and rollness!

Opening track ‘Where Heroes Go To Die’ is a lumbering heap of dissonant black fuzz daubed in vicious black metal snarls which harken back to the second wave of black metal evil. It’s difficult to see then why Ace Meggido chose such goofy artwork. The stuffy, wailing solos drift through the freezing air and the crunchy yet basement riffs evoke images of black, billowing smoke and obscure forest meanderings daubed in caked corpse-paint.

A lot of the material on offer here has a doomy trudge to its design, but there is also that infectious Bathory-style of wickedness which seeps throughout this despicably catchy opus. It’s hard then not to tap along to the lashing gallop of ‘The Signal To Attack’ and the bestial strikes of ‘Winds Without Mercy’ and ‘Those Who Will Not Return’.

You can dump this one in the same fat of fizzing acid with Born For Burning’s The Ritual opus from 2019. This is total Bathory worship and yet with other interesting whips of gloom added for good, malicious measure.

Neil Arnold

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