BLACK VOID: Antithesis (BLACK METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Lars Nedland, better known as Lazarus, remains one of the most beautiful voices of the black metal, one of those that give you the shivers as soon as they appear. Recognizable among thousands, his clear voice has always illuminated Solefald's albums and for the last twenty years Borknagar's. Last year, he enchanted us again with White Void, a band that didn't tie any link with black art, shaping on the contrary a simply (hard) rock and sometimes vaguely progressive music.

As announced by both its name and the title of his first release, Black Void is conceived as its exact opposite, an inverted reflection of a luminous project to which it opposes epidermic blackness and ferocity. The trio of White Void is reformed but the very punk approach retained naturally slows down the geysers of beauty that are the interventions of Lazarus in clear voice. Punctuating sparingly (but wisely) the menu of "Antithesis", they shine by their rarity. Too rare, to the point of watching for them like a saving beacon, like a buoy to which one clings to not be totally swallowed by the abyss.

Rumbling with a furious energy, this album keeps a limpid production neither messy nor dirty. In the same way, the melodies that drain notably the crystalline eruptions of the singer ('Void') are not spurned from this stripping mass in the end difficult to label. Neither really punk nor black metal, "Antithesis" is nevertheless a little bit of all that at the same time, a percussive and more neat broth than it seems.

Their progenitors being what they are, demanding musicians and gifted, these compositions betray a goldsmith writing that leaves no room for approximation, piling up the layers of a raging black metal ('Reject Everything') on a catchy and wildly rock'n'roll layer ('No Right, No Wrong'). If Hoest (Taake) haunts a relentless 'Death To Morality', we will retain above all the participation of Sakis Tolis on 'Dadaist Disguist'. As Lazarus did it a little while ago with the title 'Holy Mountain' of the Greeks that he colored with an icy and epic emphase in the Borknagar style, Sakis impregnates this track with an obvious Rotting Christ influence for a result as effective as superb. But the fact remains that it is the luminous bites of Lazarus that enchant us all along and propel this essay to heights of power and happiness.

Between black metal and punk, "Antithesis" is an amazing record whose harshness is combined with a cleverly elaborated writing, a negative reflection of White Void's "Anti" to which it is added to form a whole more complementary than it seems, like two sides of the same coin. - Official website

BLACK VOID

ANTITHESIS

NUCLEAR BLAST

BLACK METAL