In spite of featuring Jon Nödtveidt on vocals/guitars/keyboards and having been put to tape only a few months after the recording of ”The Somberlain”, The Black’s debut album bears surprisingly little similitude to classic Dissection. The first notable impression when listening to ”The Priest of Satan” is how gratifyingly evil it sounds. The vocals and guitar tone are rawness personified, but the guitars also sharp enough to carry the more melodic riffs central to the compositions. Drums – courtesy of band founder Markus Pesonen – exhibit a reverberated, damp and natural character which together with the stringed instruments create an equally feral and sluggishly earth-shattering underground BM production. Keyboards are employed tastefully, either to enhance certain passages or carry the melody.
In terms of style, The Black takes a position between raw melodic Scandinavian Black Metal and its lush, Heavy Metal-ized Hellenic counterpart – perhaps best exemplified by the tracks ”The Sign of the Evil Spirit” and ”Towards the Golden Dawn”. Even if the music is obviously designed to sound vile and in your face, the integration of sweeping, highly evocative melodic phrases adds a dimension often wholly lacking in similar releases.
Composition is concise and focused, with songs averaging three minutes in length and relying on the interplay between two or three phrases for song development – translating into a high degree of separate track memorability. Barring perhaps the final, six minute track, there is nothing superfluous to be found on this recording.
In a very direct and visceral fashion, The Black channels the downright sinister, triumphantly epic and crypto-melancholic through deceptively simple means. For this reason, The Black can be rightfully placed alongside the early works of Nåstrond, Ophthalamia and Throne of Ahaz as lesser-known expressions of Black Metal spirit in the Northern lands.
