You know the cult of
Xasthur
is reaching fever pitch when even ancient demos from this increasingly revered American
black metal
institution are being repackaged for official release on CD, and for the second time with a bonus disc, no less! Originally recorded circa 2001,
A Gate Through Bloodstained Mirrors
marked
's seemingly inevitable transition into a one-man operation, devoid of living drummers, helmed by the incomparably misanthropic
Malefic
and, in many ways, it establishes the general creative template he's rarely wavered from, but simply built upon, ever since. At this juncture,
's hollow roar had yet to plumb quite the fathomless depths of despair that would eventually leave him almost without equal within the extreme
metal
community, and his songwriting had yet to expand in scope through sheer time and experience with the form. But at its core, the tenebrous
immersed in murky sound and suffocating ambiance that would characterize
's most acclaimed later-day efforts can already be glimpsed here. Look and ye shall find numerous glints of dark obsidian amid the crusty volcanic bedrock, by way of haunting guitar melodies and spine-tingling keyboard figures that repeatedly surface out of the inexorably crude underlying riffs (many of them dangerously extended to the very brink of boredom, incidentally). And even though the
Burzum
influence looms large throughout (and yields reverent covers of
"Moon Shrouded in Misery"
and
"Channeling the Power of Souls Into a New God"
), there are also shades of Danish one-man-show
Nortt
sprinkled over the album's more funereal doom moments -- not to mention the legendary
Bathory
in the pagan mystery and Benedictine
chants
of
"Dwelling Beneath the Woods."
As mentioned earlier, the 2008 reissue through
Hydra Head
is made even more collectible because of a second disc containing six obscurities of varying, errrr...obscurity, including all three songs from the
A Darkened Winter
EP. In sum, perhaps there was very good reason to unearth these demos after all, even though the common listener (heck, even most
heavy metal
fans) will find them utterly unapproachable, and perhaps indefensible due to their crude recording. That's the
way of life, however, and so his supporters will surely embrace it with the same morbid fascination they showed for his subsequent releases. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia