Old Witch - Come Mourning Come (band spotlight)

I don't want to write reviews on albums, mostly because I have little to actually say most of the time, apart from the boring, adjective-infused babble of regular blog reviews. I find most of those incredibly stale and I don't really think myself as the one person who's up to the task of making something different, and interesting, for once.

Yet there is good shit that feeds the brain to some extent, such as this CVLT NATION thing, which does what you expect a review to do while begging people to toss some cash over to the band so they can push a future physical release. It's all for the greater good I know, and it prompted me to check out the band and maybe spotlight them in my own personal way.

This album is really good. If I had to describe it by comparison, I'd say it's like a more emotional Rorcal with less concern for overal composition and a few buckets of granite rubble thrown in for good measure. 

Trve to the core, the band sports its blackness with a sort of mocking pride: not much can be known about it, music titles are written in ye olde capslocke with an obvious turn to an exaggerated aesthetic of the grim and the trve. That's all the more obvious by the exaggeration both in the song titles (turns out leaves do fall in autumn!), the lyrics (still keeping with the capslock motif) and the very feature description for the band: 

Stooping in a rotting throne of dead oak, casting black thoughts to the stars, burning cold over the glacial wilderness, she reaches withered hands to the cold, eternal night, vast above the deep winter forest. We have spilled our lives an offering to old gods, this brooding vast land. Come, the funeralboats unfurl cruel sails to the north wind, seeking haven beyond the pillars of death....  

This is not to say that the band itself is fooling around. In fact there's quite a surprising ammount of detail as we explore the bandcamp: each song features its own unique artwork related to its theme and the lyrics, although sporting that exaggerated aesthetic, are well fitting and ingeniously written. The superperformance of black metal imagery appears to me more the arrogant pride of someone who knows that what they are doing is pretty fucking good. It's a sardonic dismissal of the public attitude towards the niche artistry of underground metal, very similar to the notable performance of norwegian black metal band Immortal:

The depths of true significance that underground metal hides beneath layers of distortion, bad recording quality and overall antisocial behaviour has been a known position of comfort from which artists shell themselves from the travestry of mainstream culture. Yet there are other inventive creators whose performance bridges the gap between the embrace of underground art and its inevitable caricature.

Either that or Old Witch are just taking the piss. Whatever it is, I'm ok with it, just as long as good music is being made.

Edit: Tiago pointed out that the photos they use at both their facebook page and their metal-archives page are taken from the movie Begotten, which I think reinforces my point.