MacPhisto's Rock & Metal Corner

I cannot help but feel a little bit nostalgic when writing about this release. Witching Hour come from my home region, a rural place near the French border in the southwest of Germany. I remember talking about this group on the school ground together with fellow metalheads, Witching Hour just started to doing live gigs and soon brought out their first demo. Funnily though, I never listened to the demo and neither went to seem them live. So for 10 years, I completely lost track of Witching Hour. That was until I started to scout for some old school Black Metal and by coincidence learned that not only the band was still going strong but had already put out two full-length albums! Their 2009 debut Rise of the Desecrated brings back the times of Blackened Thrash Metal that dominated the German scene in the early 80s with outstanding bands like Sodom and Destruction. As a matter of fact, the singer sounds a lot like Schmier, the vocalist of Destruction. Just like their obv...

I never was a big fan of Black Metal in general, but especially some of the old records from the 80s I hold in high esteem. This goes especially for Bathory's first output. From the very beginning of the record, it is perfectly clear why Bathory are sometimes credited as the real first Black Metal band. Sure, there were other bands that had had a very similar sound in the beginning of the eighties, but Bathory sums up most of the things that a general audience would later define as Black Metal (minus the here absent corpse painting perhaps). Bathory starts with atmospheric sounds of storm and a distant church bell. The emptiness and grimness of a dark, northern landscape directly come to mind. Definitely a Black Metal trademark. It doesn't take long though, and all hell breaks loose for the next 26 minutes. And this puts it quite well, as Bathory barely take a break from the ongoing mayhem. Each song has a  raw energy and power, not unlike the early work of Sodom or Destr...