Garhelenth - "About Pessimistic Elements & Rebirth of Tragedy" (Satanath Records/The Eastern Front, 2017)

Band: Garhelenth
Title: About Pessimistic Elements & Rebirth of Tragedy
Genre: Black Metal
Year: 14th December 2017
Time: 29 min
Rating: 74/100












IRANIAN BLACK METAAAAL! It's absolutely my first time that I review something created from Iranian musicians, and I admit I listened to the second album (in only two years after their foundation in 2010) of Garhelenth also to satisfy my curiosities about this slab of exotic metal. Fortunately, these curiosities bring me to discover that this "About Pessimistic Elements & Rebirth of Tragedy", even though this album released by Satanath Rec in cooperation with The Eastern Front (label from Israel) isn't exceptional, is anyway good beyond my expectations.

Now located in Armenia after a short period in Georgia (not the US state but the country!), Garhelenth gave life to a second album where there is a very cold, dark and grim black metal, as you can already understand by the haunting intro with freezing arpeggios "Pessimistically (Abolish the Idols)". The pace of the (6) songs is more focused on mid and slow agonizing tempos than on the fast ones, that are into "Moral to Pessimist" and "Foolish Conscience" (that ends with war samples after the last line "And kill them all") but don't expect any kind of blast-beats here. Very good is the vocal performance of the guitarist and founder Hilnorgoth, that alternates his classic black metal screams with some clean vocals.

Well, the final result is good because we are talking about songs structured in simple ways (also because the album lasts only 29 minutes) with some paranoid schemes and dark atmospheres under the clear influence of Norwegian masters like Darkthrone, Burzum and Khold with some comparisons with the Italians Lilyum (another band - now defunct, unfortunately - with a similar freezing approach to the black metal genre). Maybe, the only flaw is that Garhelenth have the repetitive tendency to offer, at a certain point of the songs, a break so to end them with a paranoid, slow and torturing finale with the result to create two distinct parts into some numbers. On the other hand, I have to say that this "repetitive tendency", even though it risks to become in the long run a too easy and predictable solution to end the songs, works well, especially into the last track "Perspective of Exorbitant", that's my favorite one in the list. Now that I satisfied my exotic curiosities about the "True Persian Black Metal" of Garhelenth, I think it's the moment to explore the Iranian extreme metal scene because it can hide other obscure treasures like the one reviewed here, don't you think?

Questions:

who is the drummer? Or is there a drum-machine? I can't find these infos by any places!

Tracklist:

1 - Pessimistically (Abolish the Idols) (intro)
2 - Destruction of the Will
3 - Foolish Conscience
4 - Self-Humiliation
5 - To Impersonal Mankind
6 - Moral to Pessimist
7 - Perspective of Exorbitant

Line-up:

Hilnorgoth - vocals/guitars
Sagroth - guitars

FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/Garhelenth
BandCamp: https://garhelenth.bandcamp.com/
Satanath Records: http://www.satanath.com/