Arcturus — La Masquerade Infernale

The always impressive Arcturus strikes again with this release. An unique metal musical, bizarreand twisted, that´s a nice description for this music. The previous release 'Aspera Hiems Symphonia' was a symphonic, atmospheric black metal album. Instead of having guitars up in the mix Arcturus put the keyboards there. One of the most brilliant albums of it´s time and genre. NowArcturus strikes again. This time with 'La Masquerade Infernale', a twisted cabaret, metal,musical, opera piece of music. It might sound pretty weird and for the unexpected 'metalhead'this is too much, but the overall music is still performed with guitars, drums, bass and a vocalist,it´s just the way they put together the songs.

For instance are the vocals done by the loved and hated Garm. At the first track he sings as lowas he can and this way he sounds half rock singer and half opera singer. And with the crazy background vocals by Simen Hestnæs the song get´s an even weirder twist. It´s as if theband could not find a female vocalist to do the vocals and they hired Simen instead, the man whocan sing like a mad arab in track 3 'The Chaos Path', which is the only song with Simen as the main vocalist. This song is the weirdest track on the album. Simen sings on 6 different tone levels with an overblownorgan on top of it. It all ends with a drum ´n bass break-beat, which suprisingly fits thesong. Track 2 is a song called 'Ad Astra' and is an instrumental track, really good with real violinsand some great keyboard lines. The keyboards are done by Sverd and he must be one of the best keyboardplayers in the Norwegian scene. Most keyboard parts on this album are twisted and sound like a carnaval ride in a rollercoaster with Lucifer breathing in your neck. The guitars done by Knut Valle are perfectly doneand add a lot of atmosphere to the music. And ofcourse we don´t have to forget Jan Axel von Blomberg a.k.a.Hellhammer. He knows how to beat his drum-skins.

The album has no drawbacks in any of the songs. Maybe the title track, which is a slow interlude,but it still adds some atmosphere to the rest of the album. So this album just can´t be missed in your collection.As hard as it might be to get into this kind of music, this is something you just have to hear.For me it´s one of my all-time classics and Arcturus will have a hard time to make an even betteralbum in the future.