Grand Celestial Nightmare (NLD) – The Great Apocalyptic Desolation LP

Black Metal

Hailing from Finland, while EMBRYONIC SLUMBER may be a brand-new entity in name, the duo are longtime veterans of the underground: VARGRAV / DRUADAN FOREST mainman V-Khaoz and Hellwind Inferion, an incredibly prolific drummer but more recently known as the vocalist for both Sargeist and Desolate Shrine. And while what they create together as EMBRYONIC SLUMBER may show slight shades of their collective pasts, the resulting recording – the full-length In Worship Our Blood is Buried, the band’s bolt-from-the-blue debut – handily transcends comparisons altogether.

Comes with poster and insert

Black Metal

One of the most accomplished newcomers Signal Rex has come across in recent years, the shadowy entity of Valais burst from the voidal womb fully formed in the middle of 2021 with their self-titled debut album. Despite existing in the vast (and vastly inconsistent) wilderness of Bandcamp, Valais in fact imparted a power and poignancy that takes most bands at least a couple records to reach, if at all. Both classically composed and forward-thinking, Valais understood right from the start the core tenets of true black metal, but equally understood how to inject their own personality and poise into such to create something that adds to the language of BLACK METAL rather than mimics its speech patterns (and sloppily so).

No, Valais as a work is a towering monument of tension and release, skillful contours and subtle dynamics, richly malevolent melody and slipstreaming violence. Aesthetic touchstones include the likes of Slidhr, latter-day Leviathan, and even Blut Aus Nord at their wiliest, but Valais also exhibit an understated sense of the pagan – perhaps stemming from their native Ireland, or perhaps from some strange cosmos far beyond our comprehension… Either way, all of this coalesces into a whilrlwinding five-song/37-minute experience that feels far vaster than that succinct runtime otherwise suggests. As such, Signal Rex is honored to rightfully release this tome in all physical formats.

Black Metal

And so it goes with the band’s sixth full-length, Esoteric Atavism. Ever aptly titled, Esoteric Atavism’s contents embody that title in a most provocative manner. While BLACK CILICE is esoteric in the extreme, more so is the entity atavistic, and indeed are those energies the cornerstone of this record. Characteristically coated in miles of miasmic rawness that’s an instrument unto itself, the lyrics of Esoteric Atavism delve into the OLD – old energies, old spiritually – and the music follows suit by reconstituting elements from elder BLACK CILICE recordings. Always in the red but now deeper into the black, that’s not to say Esoteric Atavism is a deliberate throwback or crass “return to the roots”; rather, the band’s birth pangs are given a deeper wisdom and wider-screened hysteria for the listener to drown himself in…or avoid, revoltingly stratifying as BLACK CILICE’s black metal may be. More pointedly, riffs are more forthright, with experimentation subtler, and songs in kind shorter: the proverbial ouroboros, then, forever feeding on the past.