RSS Feed


CHAOS MOON
Resurrection Extract

I, Voidhanger (2014)
Rating: 7/10

Resurrection Extract is the curiously titled third opus from intriguing US one-man band Chaos Moon. The project was started in 2004 by sole disciple Esoterica (Alex Poole) who, after two full-length albums and various EPs, decided to halt his work in 2011.

It would seem that in spite of straying from his path, however, Esoterica was keen to reignite the Chaos Moon flame and did so in 2013, returning with an EP (Plaguebearer’s Gift). Resurrection Extract is the third composition from this strange, brooding doom-laden black metal behemoth and features nine tracks, which in total run for almost an hour.

The album begins with the eerie chimes of ‘Seeing Through One I’ which – like so many of these sort of introductory tracks – is a mere instrumental foray before the serious business starts, and serious it most certainly becomes when the raging, spitting and above all speedy ‘Bloodfall’ comes hurtling down the passage like a frothing river of blood through an unsuspecting village.

Esoterica’s force feeds the listener on a diet of ugly, gnarly guitars which are spiteful in their pace, while the slower passage acts as an obscure, funereal sprawling mess of slow, hissing percussion and those arrogant vocal barks. It’s black metal in two halves to some extent, with the depressive passages walking hand with those nifty, venomous rushes of grit. ‘Altar’ has all the gushing beauty of a waterfall cascading blackness in slow motion; in oily aplomb, the guitars evoke images of freezing downpours, half-hinting at majesty but lingering in wells of sorrow – especially with the introduction of the painful, suicidal vocal barks.

And that’s the theme for this album; cold glacial enlightenment married with dank rushes of grim splendour with a touch of the epic thrown in for good measure, with the lengthy additions of ‘Dreams Scattered Over An Infinite Mirror’ and the closing gothic slab that is the ten-minute ‘Hymn To Iniquity, Part II – Exsequiae’.

In-between there’s nothing overtly fanciful about the slow, ponderous grace of the aforementioned ‘Altar’, the eerie, oozing menace of ‘Barrow’ or the multi-layered gloom of ‘Exordium Of Exile’, but because of its ever-flowing atmospherics and hidden pastures of the obscure, Chaos Moon’s resurrection is one that should be celebrated rather than mourned. This is a shining example of how to write seething, yet avant-garde black metal that is adorned in strips of sombreness and misery without dragging the listener into actual death!

Neil Arnold

<< Back to Album & EP Reviews



Related Posts via Categories
Share