(Andy Synn has something a little grimmer and grimier for you all to enjoy today)
By sheer coincidence today we’re talking about the second masked band in as many days.
But whereas Gaerea‘s semi-anonymous aesthetic has started to feel more and more like a calculated attempt to craft a marketable mystique, Calvana‘s decision to conceal their identities reads more as a purposeful rejection of anything and everything that might otherwise distract from their music.
And what music it is… as rough and as raw as their Portuguese cousins are polished and pristine, these unknown Italians continue to eschew the trappings of modernity in favour of a more primal and primitive sound that remains firmly rooted in the ancestral dirt of Black Metal.
That being said, it would be wrong… churlish, even… to dismiss Sub Janus, the band’s recently-released third album, as some sort of retro-obsessed throwback.
After all, just because Calvana aren’t out there chasing trends it doesn’t mean they’re totally ignorant of the world around them, they’re just not the sort of band to let outside factors (and outside actors) force them to change who they are.
Take opener “Twilight Song”, for example, whose eerie, flickering anti-melodies and harsh, discordant riffs are propelled by a pulsing mix of bristling blastbeats and slow-burning dread, marrying “Old School” antagonism with a touch of subtly proggy menace, while the stripped-down savagery of “My Prayer to Diana” and the sinister slither of “Sorry” both demonstrate that the Italian hellions don’t necessarily see their commitment to the classic tricks and tropes of Black Metal as a limit to their creative and compositional ambitions.
That’s not to say that the band are reinventing the proverbial wheel – fans of the likes of Tsjuder, Urgehal, and 1349 will undoubtedly find a lot to love here, especially during twin mid-album highlights “Fear Makes You Tame” (eight minutes of hateful hooks and abrasive aggression) and the brooding, blistering “Death of Pan”, while the lurid legacy of Celtic Frost hangs low and heavy over the bassy grooves and morbid melodies of tracks like “Carnivore” and “Summer Storm” – it’s simply that what they take from others they make their own.
And in an era where it sometimes seems as though it’s getting harder and harder to tell the artificial from the organic, it’s reassuring to encounter a band who aren’t ashamed of showing off the dirt under their nails or the blood in their teeth.