The Rock Blogger

Darkspace . Darkspace III . 2008. 4 stars .

This album is total insanity. With open wintry keyboards and furious black metal riffs, Darkspace create a crushing atmosphere that swallows everything around it. If you are familiar with Switzerland’s Paysage d’Hiver, you will know what to expect here, as Darkspace features PDH’s Tobias Möckl on guitars and vocals. While PDH was barren, lo-fi and rustic, Darkspace’s sound sports slightly better production and its ragged guitar rhythms are given more room to breathe. The sound created here is cold, grim and bleak but is also feverishly paced, running through torrents of visceral blackness.

Darkspace are less focused on crafting songs as they are on developing a harsh sonic landscape, as all of these tracks run long, eventually becoming monolithic walls of sound. While it is often challenging to have no distinctive compositional elements stick out in the mix, as everything blends together in a sea of darkness, there are still some powerful melodies under the surface to move the episodes along. Every so often a brutal doom metal riff will come chugging along, providing a relentless current to pull you along.

Taken as an immersing experience, Darkspace III is an exceptional black metal record that successfully incorporates ambient elements and chilling keyboard sections to full effect. In terms of disticntive song craft and variety however, causal metal fans may find this to be rather inaccessible. Its their loss still, since albums with such relentless consistency and cohesion are hard to come by.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 8:46 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.