(written by Islander)

Last September the Central Texas black metal band Brüka released their debut album Death’s Promise in cooperation with Khaoszophy Records and Pest Productions. Usually powered by viscerally propulsive rhythms and fronted by scalding vocal ferocity, it provides a twisting and turning experience.

At times the album provides sweeping melodic ice-storms in the vein of Dissection and Emperor, bleak and daunting but expansive, creating keyboard-enhanced soundscapes that engulf listeners, albeit with attention-grabbing bass nuances and vivid drum variations. At other times, the music attacks with barbaric savagery and monstrous death-metal roars, with maniacally boiling fretwork and earth-shaking cannonades.

At still other times, Brüka let the music extravagantly ring (and warp) like hellish and hallucinatory chimes or to become soft, mysterious, and elegantly haunting before exploding in feral and fierce attacks.

And then there’s the song “Envy the Lifeless“, which is the subject of the video we’re premiering today and a vivid sign of just how varied Death’s Promise is. Continue reading »