The Visions of Fading Mankind

The French black metal scene has been growing in stature for a long time now, and in particular gaining bit of a reputation for its avant-garde bent. You won’t find that here, though: The Vision of Fading Mankind showcases two completely unpretentious black metal bands, both of whom are more apt to incorporate death and thrash influences than prog or post-rock. There is perhaps an imbalance in the track listing here in two senses. Firstly, in the relative statures of the bands involved. Temple of Baal are well-known, having released several full-length records. The most recent, Lightslaying Rituals, certainly impressed me and got a pretty positive review here. Ritualization only have a couple of demos under their belt, although they do feature some notable scene characters, in particular Blastum (Merrimack, ex-Aosoth) on drums. A more important distinction is between the musical approaches of these bands, to which we now turn…

Temple of Baal can be relied upon to steamroller listeners with their suffocating and oppressive death-black amalgamation. Their four contributions here are remorselessly violent. When Mankind Falls, in particular, simply crushes. It opens as a flailing Northern blast, all dense percussive blur and tremolo picking. But as it progresses it grinds down into a much slower death metal churn, which slams almost as hard as the recent Undergang record. Whilst their centrepiece is the delectably blasphemous Heresy Forever Enthroned, a glowering nine-minute epic building towards a neatly worked lead guitar climax, my favourite is the much shorter Slaves to the Beast. This is fast and chaotic, and in its fiery intensity it reminds me of the latest album from contemporaries on the French scene, Aosoth.

The sheer weight of Temple of Baal’s half (in fact, their two-thirds) makes Ritualization’s three songs all the more exhilirating. This is brilliant. They are faster and thrashier than their partners in crime, and work perfectly as a shot of blasphemous adrenaline after the previous twenty minutes’ pounding. Ave Dominus leaps from one blackened-thrash riff to another with a vitriolic hyperactivity, with Warchangel’s sickeningly guttural vocals giving their sound an additional layer of horrid weight. The Second Crowning has a really nasty retro feel to it, and the release finishes with a cover of Mortem’s The Devil Speaks in Tongues; a chaotic collision of rabid speed and funereal slow riffs in the finest tradition of South American extreme metal violence. Superb!

So, even if a little mismatched, this split features some great material. In fact, the mismatch is part of the appeal. Listening to Temple of Baal is like being force-fed red meat, with Ritualization arriving as a mouthful of lemons to annihilate the taste of blood and gristle with piercing bitterness. If that simile makes any sense… Whatever, this is well worth picking up.