Siculicidium - Utolsó Vágta az Univerzumban (2009)

Finding its way to our mailing address, today we have Siculicidium and their first full-length release of crushing Black Metal. “Utolsó Vágta az Univerzumban” or “Last Gallop in the Universe” contains 6 tracks of dense apocalyptic Black Metal in the vein of bands like Inquisition and such. For 39 minutes we are taken into the dark deep corners of the bands very destructive sound.

Before you move on to the next review thinking that Siculicidium is just another Black Metal band, you better stick around since this release features a very effective aural attack that combines both rawness and melody in a brilliant manner to produce a very old-school sounding album.

Starting off with the album title track, the band immediately establishes a shroud of darkness with their crushing distorted guitars and raspy Black Metal shrieks. While the band’s musical approach might be a bit simplistic at the beginning, the carefully placed melodic sections with clean guitars makes them sound a bit like Agalloch and similar bands at some points. This clearly changes the direction of the song, making them be very melodic and crushing at the same time.

With an interesting opening the second track creeps on you and explodes with rhythmical guitars and the typical vocals. In this song the drums sound very different from what you would expect and keep the tempo of this track very low key. Around the middle of the song we get another clean passage with spoken vocals, only to fully explode again into ‘aggressive’ mode and get back down to acoustic section nearing the end. These tempo changes and brilliantly mixed interludes of clean passages add great value to the songs and make the band sound different from your typical band.

With the perfect balance of crushing guitars, hellish vocals, and overall atmospheric creepiness, “Utolsó Vágta az Univerzumban” is actually a very interesting and appealing release. Fans of slower ‘true’ Black Metal will rejoice and fans of more sophisticated incarnation of the genre will also find themselves pleased. We think that Siculicidium has made a great job with this release and we can’t wait to listen to more music from this three-man band.

Release: January 7th, 2009

Country: Romania