Arvas – Black Satanic Mysticism (2015)

Filled with hate and a raw intensity that many bands would envy, today we have Arvas and their devastating third full-length release “Black Satanic Mysticism”. While many bands focus in making pretty music, Arvas delivers brutality in high doses in this very ‘in-your-face’ destructive release.

Slowly blasting away with the real opener “Flames of Black”, the band’s sound is completely raw, but not always in a good way as it seems to be an artifact of the crude production. We appreciate the extra brutality that this conveys, but sometimes the sound is a bit too much and it gets to sound like a live recording without. Pummeling through tracks like “Beholder of Demons” and its funky keyboards at the end, “Redemption Black”, and “Faith of Negatron”, this album shapes up to be a mixture of Immortal with Impiety. The band starts going in more creative directions with the solid “Follow the Raven”, which sounds more like your average Pagan Metal track.

A clear example of the weird mix/production that makes this album sound bad in some places is the muffled sounds behind the devilish vocals in “Path to the Fires of Hel”. This saturated sound greatly hampers the enjoyment of some of the songs. This track has an interesting structure and tempo, but gets lost when you can’t really listen to it normally. Without this mixing/production issue, tracks like “Starlight Eclipse” and “Call of the Abyss”, would be quite memorable and enjoyable intense Black Metal pieces.

“Black Satanic Mysticism” is one of those releases that is quite solid and raw, but there are just enough weird production/mixing issues with it that make it less enjoyable. We hope that the MP3 version of the album we are reviewing is the cause of these issues because Arvas has released a pretty solid album with interesting songs. If you like raw and brutal Black Metal with a certain old-school vibe, and don’t mind the funky production, this is one crushing release.

Label: ATMF

Release: March 30th, 2015

Genre: Black Metal

Country: Norway