Negură Bunget — Om

Black metal has often had spiritual yearnings, an affliction with dark natural and grim black gods, that’s present in nearly every black metal project you can think of to lesser or larger extent. With Om Negură Bunget have brought these spiritual tendency to new epic levels, making an album that still at is heart is black metal ,but sprouts its black roots off into many other genres.

They managed to knit into the album touches of deep dark ambience, post rock, prog and world music, and all manner other of cross genres breeding. Building an album that is both deeply mystical and darkly medative to grimly satisfying, every track is so densely packed with depth of atmosphere and inventive musically ideas. A few good examples of this are; Țesarul de lumini which weaves together epic and soaring post rock vibe, with down and dirt metal riffling before zooming into dark dank caverns of mulit layered black metal, with deviation off into soundtrack and folk elements along the way. Or the almost jazzy meets world-music rhythmic come cinematic of Inarborat intro, that grows into a fire breathing prog black metal with grim heart of soaring epic killing grace, they add in all manner of intricate guitar twists and turns, odd rhythmic elements, Voïvod-like discordent riffing, clear chanted vocals, bassy prog fluctuations. As you can see each track is it own little adventure, with all the songs togeather work as the whole awe inspiring trip, to the highest cliffs down to the deepest black pits. Really I can't remember Black metal sounding this fresh and epic in a very long time.

The edition I picked was in a wonderful plush double digi-pak with an extra DVD which includes a few videos from the album which for the most part are nicely and mystical put together woodland footage. Four live recordings of tracks from different times and places, and an interesting though little pretentious interview with two of the band members about the album. The disk is a nice extra to the album giving it yet more depth.

An album to get your self lost in, that covers all the bases from grim discordant riffing, to rich ambience, to dark cimnatics, to epic rock to many other musical adventure that become clear the deeper you swim into this dense masterwork, but most important it all sound so fluid and effortless and epic. Truly breathtaking stuff and the best multi-layered black metal record in many a moon.