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p r e s e n t s

ARTIST   : Wolfsschrei                        STOREDATE   : 00-00-2006
ALBUM    : Torture Of A Human Soul            RIPDATE     : 01-16-2015
YEAR     : 2006                               RUNTIME     : 22:08 min
GENRE    : Black Metal                        LANGUAGE    : English
LABEL    : Raging Bloodlust Records           GRABBER     : EAC Secure
SOURCE   : CD EP                              ENCODER     : FLAC 1.2.1
QUALITY  : 1099kbps Avg 44.1kHz 2 channels    SIZE        : 182.9MB
URL      : http://tinyurl.com/k2sn49g         TRACKS      : 3  Files

01  Innermost Scenario                                            6:19
02  Torture Of A Human Soul                                       8:05
03  Lost In Void                                                  7:44

22:08 min

After listening to this about a dozen times and desperately trying
to start a review for it, I've come to a certain conclusion about
"Torture of a Human Soul": this is exactly what black metal sounds
like today. Not a specific style of black metal- not a
French-sounding band, a Darkthrone clone, anything like that- but a
sort of aggregate of black metal's various styles and sounds
congealed into a whole. People ask for primers on the black metal
genre and others give them advice and suggestions, usually in the
canon of classic black metal albums. Wolfsschrei, on the other hand,
actually sounds like what we know as Black Metal these days. It is
what you hear when you think of those words in your head. It helps
as well that it's quite good.

Wolfsschrei plays a German style of black metal that really just
forms an average of other styles of black metal. The riffs are
mostly tremolo-based and fluctuate between a Germanic style of
melody and a somewhat atonal, Darkthrone-style crunching dissonance,
both tempered with an almost depressive, rainy sort of musical
texture. Drums are simple and straightforward- slow blasts,
rock-based depressive sections, and simple fills, while vocals are a
straightforward screech you've heard a thousand times before.
Wolfsschrei's music tends to hum and throb with a bleary, modern
sense of energy, distorted and static to the point of an almost
complete lack of identity- yet that somehow works. Wolfsschrei's
music isn't so much meant to be a statement of identity and style so
much as a very immediate, present sense of what black metal is at a
certain moment- which paradoxically makes it reflect the genre
better than nearly anything else.

From moment to moment this music has an immediate, attacking energy,
where every note seems to replace the one before it rather than lead
into a narrative whole. The riffs are intense and engaging, but very
fast, intense, and somewhat intentionally shallow- they're melodic,
but they don't lead to some great understanding or revelation. They
ride off the insistent texture of thrash beats and sluggish
depressive passages without really meaning much more than what they
immediately are. While "Torture of a Human Soul" is an overtly
shallow piece of music, what it lacks in depth it more than makes up
for by knowing its limits and functioning as a wonderful, sort of
adolescently spirited slab of fast, engaging black metal that exists
merely to exist and nothing more.

If you're seeking something brilliant and classic, this is not it.
However, Wolfsschrei's music seems almost more inherently relevant
due to its total and intentional irrelevancy. "Torture of a Human
Soul" is going to last forever simply because it was never built to
last- it's black metal to the core, and I would rather listen to
this than nearly anything else much of the time.

Mini-album, thus again tagged CDEP.

CATARACT: CLOUDING YOUR VISION