Title: An Erratic Crusade
Label: War Productions
Release Date: 26 February 2018
Country: France
Format reviewed: Digital CD quality
Pretend that you are Dante Alighieri, crossing the gates of hell and finding yourself in the Anteinferno. The anteroom of the limbo. A place where sinners run naked, being eternally bitten by insects and wasps. You continue going through the circles of hell and you get to the ninth. What music would be heard in that immense well constituted by a huge lake of ice? Your body freezes, tied, in a desperate cry towards the eternal vacuum of misery. The only thing you hear, when you stop screaming, is the album "An Erratic Crusade" by Leda Spiridon.
The work has only 3 Tracks, although of great duration (one of them reaches to spend the 20 minutes of duration), and starts with "Hellyon My Faith", showing its most energetic facet. Hypnotic programmed drums, raw guitars, very reminiscent of the first wave and rough vocals, sinister and with a certain effect treatment, very satisfactory. I can not help but think of a mixture of Mirkvid with a very Old School Industrial flavor of the 80's, like Un-Kommuniti, when I listen to it. The next song, "An Erratic Crusade" begins to show the true essence of the band, and the feature that surprised me the most about them. The first half continues with the caustic and metallic tone, although from the middle it becomes purely industrial, recalling those sickly and bizarre atmospheres to which I referred earlier. The song crawls, and evaporates like a schizoid ode to the darkest places of our unconscious.
The Odyssey continues, and we reach the star of the album: The suite "Oaze", which starts slowly, almost like a doom lament, as if invoking ancestral spirits, until it ends in a climatic and highly atmospheric passage. The trip lasts just over twenty minutes, and the notion of time and space disintegrates, as our futile attempt to get out of the strange trance. The epic is alternating between black/doom chants, lacerated by synthesizers and the intoxicating coldness of moments closely linked to dark ambient, excellently achieved. It is in these structures of dark narcolepsy that the band reaches the sumum of their synergy. Where the thin line between the Dark and Ritual Ambient find the perfect osmosis between the heavy psychedelia and the most unorthodox black metal of their proposal.
The recording exudes grace and certain references that only the most trained and fine palates will know how to discern. Undoubtedly a different proposal, carried out by musicians who risk going through little explored paths and away from the most accepted and safeguarded standards of today's black metal. "An Erratic Crusade" is an original album, haunting, and full of excellent ideas, from a band that promises to become a future legend of the most original extreme underground music. Totally recommended. 9/10. Sergio
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9/10 Epic Storm
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