Welcome to Bay Area, where the sun shines and destruction crawls, endlessly. Lurking somewhere in the East Bay, the mysterious black metal horde known as XENOTAPH have managed to craft a demo so grand and timeless that it’s almost impossible to believe it’s the work of four young dudes hailing from the sunny banks of the east San Francisco Bay. These four caustic and suffocating blasts of necrotic black metal that the band have crafted under the form of Vitae Iactura sound like something coming straight from the icy and desolate plains of the Norwegian tundra plunged into and endless and demonic winter rather than tunes made by a bunch of Californians.
It’s absolutely impressive how these boys have managed to re-evoke a timeless aesthetic and pure integrity coming straight from the memorable Scandinavian glory of the early nineties. The four tracks contained in this decaying fucking shell of madness are superlative slabs of primordial and vile black metal that summon the glory of early Darkthrone, Emperor and early Dissection with immense evocative force. The sound that permeates the demo is an icy and desolate cap of dissonance and raw cacophony, and the riffs contained within are stellar and concise gallops of furious and decaying rage. Not devoid of scattered slower tempos and more eerie passages, the demo also offers some pretty unique, more atmospheric and reflective moments that mix things up even more, conveying at times a sense of total loss and desolation mixed in with their signature evil and blasphemous sonic nightmare. XENOTAPH are yet another awesome fucking reason to love the Bay Area music scene and these corpse-paint-and-spike-covered boys are yet another splendid example of what beautiful and high grade musical destruction can blossom in this beautiful scene. Check out their demo on Bandcamp and see them in action in the footage below – courtesy of Kevin Hobbs. Horns to the sky!
awksedperl
November 8, 2013 at 1:47 pm
The band’s name is misspelled in the first paragraph.