Ascensão do Vazio

Escuro is an one man band from Brazil, which was formed in 2014. What impressed me at first was the manifest which accompanied the two releases that I received. It approaches the underground scene with an anarchist view, as their only member Erebos states, free from the concept of money and profit. So with a quite favorable mood towards the band I began to listen to their first EP release which is called “Ascensão do Vazio”. This EP was released in January of 2015 and it contains three tracks of overall duration of about eighteen minutes. Musically Escuro present us a harsh, dark and old school Black Metal which reminds a lot of the sound of the first releases of Burzum.

The first thing that the listener will notice is the completely “homemade” production. The sound is quite dirty, harsh and fuzzy. The positive thing is that it allows the listener to listen to the riffs and every instrument without any important problem. So, the riffs are very harsh and at the same time melodic and apart from the straightforward and the almost simplistic way of composing the tracks, they have some variety. So the long in duration tracks achieve to maintain the listeners interest. The riffs are aggressive, full of hatred and darkness. Their speed is mainly fast, but it there are a lot of rhythmic parts and slow, almost Doom passages. Generally, their compositions are quite ordinary and maybe you will feel that you have heard them before. However, there are one or two melodies in every track that show that the band can acquire its personal element in the future.

The instruments are played well and with no mistakes. The guitars have quite bass and dirty sound but they deliver the riffing and the atmosphere of the compositions well. Unfortunately, the bass is entirely lost into this fuzzy sound. The drums are played with accuracy and power, while their lines too are quite interesting. Also the mixture is into quite primitive level. It has tried to maintain a balance between the instruments and a style of live rehearsal. This effort is not successful in every part of the album. Finally, the lyrics are contained into the cd, they are written in Brazilian and I don’t know what they refer to.

Summing up, the first effort of Escuro caused various mixed feelings. Firstly, the dirty, primitive sound didn’t bother me. The compositions have quite a lot of interesting parts but in general you will feel like you have heard them before somewhere else. On the contrary though, the band shows elements that they reveal its talent and their will for creation. So, combined with the revolutionary personality, I think that in the future they will offer to us more interesting works. If you are a fan of the old, primitive Black Metal sound listen to it.