Hauled over the shoulders of a dark priest, we're carried off in the moonlight to a cathedral of magick and ritual, overseen by the minions of Satan himself...
#1
Ghost - Opus Eponymous
Ghost are like their namesake. They dress in Emerald robes fashioned by Satanic brotherhoods. The silences in between their notes are haunted by an all-consuming darkness all their own. The band are like a dark cabal seething timeless doom and chilling, merciless melody; their "self-titled" record a triumph of occult practicing, retro loving dark rock masters. It’s not like they’ve rummaged though boxes of dusty Nazareth or Free records from the 70s and purloined riffs in the vain hope no-one will notice (thanks for nothing, Opeth); Opus sounds like a fresh, new record; not some kind of hackneyed early 70s hand-me-down. Harder still is to imagine that their hymns like Satan Prayer are tongue-in-cheek homage to scheming cartoon devils, when they (and who really knows who they are – their identities are shrouded in complete secrecy) chant “Hear our Satan Prayer/ anti-Nicene creed” over simple martial beats of drum and shuddering bass, their tunes burrow themselves into our minds so effortlessly.
Like brothers in arms they invoke the insidious
Mercyful Fate spirit in
Elizabeth, our gloried gossamer-throated vocalist's (
who?!!) herniated cries to the long departed Ms. Bathory as devotional as it will ever sound. They don’t even care for convention, especially on the pulsating
Ritual; the band joins in harmony to finish the chorus, yet they loathe even waiting to start the first line of verse – but it works so damn well it’s impossible to fault them; especially that confident, fluid bluesy soloing to close the track out.
Though completely out of place, the genuinely beautiful closer Genesis is packed full of freewheeling synthesizer and acoustic flourishes, like looking through a prog rock glass darkly. Black metal has engorged and exhausted itself on providing listeners with “maximum Satan” through faster blast beats, more pompous lyrical posturing and a pleading insistence that their work is art, dammit, art! If you hear their cover of the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun, it’s worth the price of admission alone. Ghost have reworked it into a black mass hymn abounding with organ hits and phaser-driven guitars marching at a funereal pace, grandly building as a chorus of ghouls harmoniously sing those immortal words; “Sun, sun, sun, here we come,” submerging them in inky blackness. Proceedings end with an abrupt halt as their gargantuan organ reverberates to a thunderous close.
The irony aside, Ghost eschews all that pretentious bullshit that’s accumulated and ossified the black metal scene; Ghost have unleashed a truly remarkable debut metal record upon this cruel world. The black gauntlet has been thrown, the torch bared, the keepers of which are true heirs of the cult of metal. All hail, Ghost!
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Gold Award: Amorphis - The Beginning of Times
Silver Award: Within Temptation - The Unforgiving
Bronze Award: Anthrax - Worship Music
