Taranis (Pol) - 1992 - Obscurity (Demo)

There have been many bands strongly influenced by the likes of early Samael and Hellhammer, but few had taken it to this extreme and pulled it off as well as these Polish madmen. This band specialized in creating heavily doom-laden black metal, sounding like the hideous lovechild of the two aforementioned bands.

The production on here is not what you would expect from a 1992 black metal demo. It's one of those cases where there is a perfect balance of rawness and clarity, with the end result being the most fitting way to capture what the band was going for. Although the music itself is far from original, it is still very well done in the sense that they achieved what they originally set out to do: worship the altar of the mighty Samael and Hellhammer. Basically, what they did was take Samael's favoring of slower, blackened doom-oriented tempos and riffs and combined it with Hellhammer's simplicity in both some of riffs as well as the song structures. However, that is not to say it is nearly as primal or primitive as the Hellhammer demos, it just shares some strong aesthetic similarities.

I'd like to thank Mr. Wraith from the Dunkelheit blog for hooking me up with a nice 320 kbps rip of this bad boy. I will be posting the band's 1995 album, Faust, in the near future, so keep checking back for that.

Enjoy.

Also, it's the summer time (happy summer, everybody), meaning school is over and I now have much more time on hands to update this more frequently then I have been over the course of the school year.