Metal Blade
9/10
“Not by His grace but my own,
I choose to live with pride
Your “merciful” God disgusts me,
His kingdom infested with lies”
Ancient is a Norwegian band that for some time was considered to be “false” Black Metal (I guess because Aphazel hasn’t burnt down any church yet nor has been behind bars neither).Now they release their new album through American major Metal Blade (wow!), a real grandiose opus named “The Cainian Chronicles”, half a concept album whose main story is referred to the myth of Cain who is vanished from heaven for having killed his brother Abel and thus doomed to live in darkness.
The album begins with “Ponderous Moonlightning”, an instro that brings afterwards place to the cyclonic “Part I: The Curse”. This song is quite representative for all the the album’s tracks since it has many elements that do also appear in the other songs: Different vocalisms (so done to represent the different characters that appear on the story: God, Cain, Lilith, archangels Michael and Gabriel…), cyclic repetitive guitar based melodies, ultra-fast drumming, etc… The album also has several acoustic parts that bring more feeling to the story of Cain’s fall and his transformation into a vampyr doomed to fear the “heavenly” light. The album is divided into two parts, one binding the 4 parts that refer to Cain’s story and the other one is just a few independent songs whose lyrics are based upon typical Black Metal topics such as darkness, the forests (“Homage To Pan”), paganism (“The Pagan Cycle”) and so on. I want to remark the absolutely superb quality of the lyrics (written by Lord Kaiophas), that are meaningful and show LK’s mastering of the occult subjects.