Few bands get it absolutely right the first time – within the realm of black metal, Emperor, Celtic Frost, Ulver, and maybe Agalloch come to mind. So when The Great Old Ones turned in a solid debut in Al-Azif, prospects were good that the band’s next effort could be a breakthrough. Sure, There was the usual Weakling-worship and some songs stood our more than others, but Al-Azif had some exciting qualities to it, mostly revolving around the album’s sinister vibe and saturation with all things H.P. Lovecraft. It’s only been two years since then, but The Great Old Ones is already back for round two, and this time the band has taken everything that made its debut a good album and amplified them to make Tekeli-li an all-around superb one.
Of
all the extreme metal beasts wandering the musical underworld, black
metal and doom metal are among the most fearsome and strange. From the
darkest depths of the human psyche these creatures arose, boring their
way towards the light from frostbitten forests and sweltering swamps.
The latter gave us early doom mavens Exhorder and Eyehategod, but
somewhere down the line Louisiana birthed some truly terrifying monsters
like Thou. A quintet specializing in music designed to break souls,
Thou has tempered its blackened doom for nine years through three albums
and a menagerie of EPs and splits. At the core of Thou’s ideology is a
distaste for societal constructs; an abhorrence of the artificial
paradigms ruling our world. Heathen, then, is both a logical continuation – and the boldest chapter yet – of that treatise on humanity’s true face.
