ninehertz

I sing their praises often, but its worth saying again, Caligari Records really is a neat label, my favourite conduit for finding these strange nuggets of death metal oddities and demos from around the world.

Enter Citrinitas, from Finland, with their short three-track Unending Descent. Not that it is purely death metal, instead a whole bag of weirdness that I found utterly captivating despite natural instincts telling you otherwise.

This is clouded base death metal, so opaque in production and approach you can barely hear some of the instruments and the vocals require a strain to detect. It’s like listening to ghosts recorded on an old handheld tape recorder. The first track is slow and mystical with it and nudging it into, at first, doom worlds and then on towards the more esoteric black metal plains. It is oddly fascinating in its lack of energy and focus.

My favourite is Light Permeates Everything – a less apt a song title you’ll struggle to find, where the sound is so murky. There’s an almost gothic beauty to it though somehow, even with the croaking other-realm vocals, the gothic doom guitars are gorgeous within the fog-plaited obscure art horror soundtrack nature of the whole.

The threadbare guitar lines are almost playful; in such a strange manner you can’t help but be enthralled by it. And this encapsulates why I fell for this obscure little EP – a band with a distinct vision to combine death and black and doom, to stubbornly and steadfastly mask it within these walls of smog – I was transfixed for the majority of its twelve or so minutes of length.