Year: 2025
Label: Handful of Hate
Rating: 7 / 10
Meet the next addition of fresh young blood to the Krywian scene: MORDSTORM. These guys diligently honor the unholy traditions of Black Metal and are not shy about old-fashioned pathos in aesthetics, presentation and ideas. After releasing this demo, they even staged a mystification based on magic of numbers, claiming it as the release from 1999, but then confessed that it was actually recorded in 2025. I would call it “...as the Pyre Devours The Black Sky” a demo album, where everything is still pretty raw. The sound can be compared with a couple dozen records of DROWNING THE LIGHT or LLN bands, or even with the old Polish bands of the second and third echelons. It's trebly, high-pitched, distant, and noisy. The songs are also a bit raw: somewhere they have real music, and somewhere there is just scratching of two notes to a hectic blast beat. And this stupid idea to put an instrumental track right after the intro... No one does that, and I don't even need to explain why.
But ”... as the Pyre ... "it's working. The primitive sound is not just another sample of "live in bedroom“; it contains some rudiments of its own character or ”production". The music is constantly changing its shape: it has keys and an atmosphere, it rushes straight ahead along a narrow corridor like Marduk, it falls into a black ritual chamber, it swings the listener on a medium-tempo “seesaw”. The archaic sound creates an additional veil that, on the first attempt, does not let through not only poseurs and tourists, but also experienced audiences. Anyone who wants to will listen over and over again to understand what's going on in MORDSTORM's music. I love such albums the most because they have the value of repeated listenings. Every time you find something new in them (but you also quickly forget most of the material, since the sound is not conducive to memorization). But I would say that the most powerful aspect of "... as the Pyre ... " is such an immeasurable thing as the spirit of true Black Metal. It embodies the things that come to mind when you talk about this genre: extreme ideas of serving a higher evil, impenetrability to a mass listener, elitism, mysticism. It feels like MORDSTORM's goal is not to play concerts or host Q&A sessions for fans on Instagram, but old-fashioned musical extremism. At least at this stage. Time will tell what happens next.
The CD from Handful of Hate has an 8-page colored booklet with all the lyrics and a million photos of the band in various poses. I understand that everyone loves successful photo shoots, but you need to have some modesty, good citizens! However, everything looks very good and stylish. There are certain complaints about the texts, since these guys' English is far from perfect, but no one is born trained. The only thing that strikes me is that the forest aesthetic doesn't suit this record at all. Nothing in the lyrics is tied to it, and the music, especially in those parts where the keys sound, makes you think not about woods, but rather about the sea or even the ocean. Details on a video.
