I was actually a little nervous about putting on Old Corpse Road’s debut full-length album for the first time. Following the band’s EP ‘the echoes of tales once told’ and their even more impressive split EP with the Meads of Asphodel, could the album possibly live up to my lofty expectations? Could they expand their epic story-telling to album length and maintain the sense of earthen atmosphere that made their EP appearances so special? I needn’t have worried. Old Corpse Road have been working up to ‘tis witching hour… so as spectres we haunt this kingdom’ for a long time and the result is a black metal album that is powerful, icy, quintessentially English and often very beautiful. Like fellow UK act Winterfylleth, Old Corpse Road have tapped into the country’s long and fascinating history, drawing upon pagan beliefs, folk lore and the fading beauty and grandeur of the English countryside to deliver an album that is spectral, elegant and unique. Here you’ll find elements of Cradle Of Filth’s frantic early black metal, My Dying Bride’s epic vision, Burzum’s icy cold and Bathory’s dry delivery, all bound up with Old Corpse Road’s own unique, folk-influenced vision and from the very start you’ll find yourself entranced; ensnared in the band’s long-lost world as the music draws you to a long-lost time far away from the irrelevancies and ignorance of modern life.
To listen to an Old Corpse Road album is a transcendental experience. Unlike the adrenalin charged might of Slayer, or the complex machinations of Meshuggah, Old Corpse Road take you on a journey through the lost ages. It is a journey of the imagination, the band acting as your guide as they draw you by the hand offering glimpses of a bygone age drenched in the tallow from sputtering candles and spilled mead. Like Burzum or Emperor this is music that surrounds and enfolds you, the only way to listen being to lose yourself utterly within the moment and to submit yourself to the album as a whole rather than try to understand it as a series of separate tracks. Everything here from the detailed, beautifully crafted lyrics to the packaging (a special limited edition coming with a small piece of the Old Corpse Road in a small pouch and a hand signed certificate from the band is particularly valuable to fans) reeks of the care and attention to detail that Old Corpse Road lavish upon their art and to treat it with any less care as a fan is to do it a grave disservice.
Offering ten tracks (three of which form a single tale) in just under an hour, Old Corpse Road have placed great emphasis on the lyrics. Each song echoes the habits of yore by telling a tale, the music setting the mood and providing the haunting backdrop as each story unfolds. Here there are murderous deeds and spectral creatures, drunken story-tellers and scared ferrymen – it is a brilliantly assembled cast of story tellers and even divorced from the music the lyrics make fascinating reading. The opening track, an eerie intro, sets the dark tone of what is to come, recalling the Shakespearean grandeur of My Dying Bride, and then ‘the cauld lad of Hylton’ sets things off in fine style with the band deftly switching between icy black metal riffs, eerie, ethereal passages reminiscent of Burzum and the haunting, spoken-word doom of My Dying Bride in order to tell the tale of a murdered boy returning to haunt his attacker. A stunningly evocative track, the music is beautifully played and delivered with such power and ferocity that you are compelled to succumb to its dark charms. ‘Hag of the mist’ is a more straight forward black metal assault reminiscent of Cradle of Filth on their epic ‘dusk and her embrace’, all rampaging riffs, screeched vocals and massed backing vocals. Heavy as hell, but with an atmosphere as dry and brittle as Miss Havisham’s dining room, if any song is able to work in isolation from the rest of the album it is this devastating assault. Here, as elsewhere, it is the band’s multiple vocalists that really bring Old Corpse Road out on their own as masters of storytelling. The multiple voices, ranging from narrator to characters within the story, bring each tale to life in a way that few bands can manage and the result is spell-binding. At ten minutes it is an epic track that runs from epic black metal to complex, ethereal ambience and back again, and it’s hard to imagine another band playing music as complex, daring and original as this apart from, perhaps, the mighty Winterfylleth.
‘The buried moon’ is a short track which opens with the icy keyboards of the Watcher setting the scene before an acoustic lament is picked out, the music a soothing balm after the furious epic that preceded it. A subtle segue, ‘the buried moon’ leads to the remarkable centrepiece of the album – ‘the crier of Claiffe’, a stunning three-part tale that incorporates traditional folk melodies, searing black metal and more into a tale that is as grand, as ambitious and as stunning as anything Emperor attempted. The first part of the tale sets the scene as a folk-inspired massed harmony introduces the scene from which the tale begins “again, again, a wild voice came: “a boat, a boat! In heaven’s name!” before watery sound effects wash over the listener and you hear the voice itself, lost and out to sea. ‘The crier of Claiffe’ itself begins with the gentlest of acoustic introductions before becoming lost in a flurry of frozen riffs and harrowing screams. Cleverly juxtaposing black metal screams with the sombre tones of The Wanderer, the tale is rendered in wonderful clarity whilst maintaining the brutal atmosphere of classic black metal. It’s as extreme as metal gets and yet the sound is somehow elegant and stately at the same time, a musical dichotomy that explains the close ties between the folk and black metal genres that so often seem incongruous to outsiders. The piece concludes with ‘the secret of the rolling waves’, a hymnal coda that recalls the solemn melody of ‘eternal father, strong to save’.
After so epic a set, many bands would be tempted to draw the line there, exhausted by their own innovative genius, but Old Corpse Road are far from finished and ‘Isobel – Queen of the Scottish Witches’ tells the tale of erotic ceremonies conducted under moonlight. Salacious and lustful, it shares elements with Cradle of filth’s recent lascivious masterpiece ‘darkly, darkly Venus Aversa’, and it is one of the album’s more straight forward black metal tracks. Similarly ferocious is ‘Glassensikes at Witching hour’ which details the terrible apparitions haunting the Harewood hill area of Darlington (a similar story to that referenced in the Barghest O’ Whitby) which include a goblin and a headless horseman. It is a tale of spectral fear delivered via searing black metal and it sees Old Corpse Road closing the album with all guns blazing. One final track awaits – the outro piece ‘as spectres we haunt this kingdom’ – which draws the record to a close as the firelight dies and the record ceases to spin.
The UK black metal scene has, of late, been doing much to inspire and excite music fans around the world. This year alone has seen amazing releases from De Profundis, Winterfylleth and now from Old Corpse Road. There is an elegance to the band’s sound that is drawn from centuries past, a sense of the epic that is lacking in today’s distressing, consumerist culture and an atmosphere which can only result from a group of musicians developing a shared passion for music, culture and heritage. You cannot fake or imitate the deep, dark, wonderful music produced by Old Corpse Road, it is as tied up with feeling and emotion as it is with musical ability and practice and ‘tis witching hour…’ is the remarkable, beautiful result. Few bands get this good in a lifetime of playing, Old Corpse Road have perfected their unique style over the course of two EPs, making the thought of their continued growth somewhat mind-boggling. This is essential as music gets.
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