Arnaut Pavle – Arnaut Pavle
Skeletonized by Demon.
Eat the Soil from This Grave.
Drop the Coffin.
Read those again.
Are you ready for some black fucking metal yet? And yes, the ‘fucking’ is necessary, because this isn’t your weeping vampire or $300 occult tome variety black metal, this is pure fucking evil in the old ways, raw as the flames of hell biting at your heels, pure as the antarctic wastes black fucking metal. Arnaut Pavle is the pure hatred-driven union of Ildjarn’s concrete block production and punk sensibility with mid-period Darkthrone’s obscurely misanthropic atmosphere and thrash-based destructiveness. Poison that with Old Wainds-esque croaking vocals, brooding doom riffs to really hammer home the venomous contempt, and razor-sharp, tetanus-rotten solos, and you have one mean demo.
These 7 tracks of relentless evil never screw around for a second in spreading their doctrine of destruction. The madness never stops, but that doesn’t mean the execration of all that is sacred is one-sided; far from it. Arnaut Pavle conjure up fire with savage but creative (or is it destructive?) punk riffs, cryptic Under A Funeral Moon possessed arpeggios, hammer-on-to-hell thrash attacks, ominous doom dirges, untamed solos, and militant tremolo eruptions. The tortured skins are primitive but viciously active, and the bass churns and rumbles in the jaws of the abyss underneath it all. There’s a hint that Arnaut Pavle has more ambitions in their quest for total death in the last track, “Answer”, opening with alienated and eerie electronics, like an extremely quick and to the point take on the ambient sections of Strength & Anger, and concluding with a bitterly melancholy tremolo melody. It’s not these vile elements alone that make this essential; it’s the way they’ve been obsessively forced together into a compacted diamond of sonic hate. Arnaut Pavle is the work of an elite warband, already making their mark and standing alone with a firestorm of riffs, ruthlessly locked into terse expressions of unbound contempt.
Nothing else needs to be said. Get your claws on this tape. Worship. -Jake
Fallen Empire
Worm Gear 