by Devon Chodzin (@bigugly)
Black Curse walks a bleak tightrope. The Denver, Colorado supergroup boasting members of Primitive Man, Spectral Voice, and Khemmis blacken their death metal riffs and deaden their black metal screeches; the heads wonder if this music counts as war metal. What it counts as is agonizing: Black Curse’s second album, Burning in Celestial Poison, is 45 minutes of excruciating malevolence. Four years after their debut, the band returns with four curses, recited with impenetrable shrieking and swirling guitars hollering from the depths of Hell. If “Ruinous Paths…” and “...to Babylon” are to be understood as one song, which I do, then no movement on Burning dips below ten minutes, presenting unbridled cruelty and downright evil as strokes of brilliance.
“Spleen Girt With Serpent” opens with one sonorous chord and shivering cymbal like a Rocky Mountain gale before erupting into a proper conflagration, hustling at breakneck speeds toward the abyss. Eli Wendler’s screams resist decipherability but register with their desperation and fury. The band’s debut Endless Wound meandered nauseatingly between songs, etching a vague yet ghastly set of images; Burning feels more cogent. Highly technical passages decompose into flurries of ephemeral noise and respawn into something melodic. The meandering Black Curse pursues on Burning means moments of transportive blackened euphoria and disorienting gaps of noise between riffs; it all stays within a set of legible bounds the band constructed that goes beyond what one type of extremity can accomplish. Everything feels like it contributes to the misery.
“Trodden Flesh” extends to nearly twelve minutes, rich with assaulting blast beats and guitar squeals that sound like demons circling above. Between growls, the song is rich with catchy riffs that serve as on-ramps: if that last miserable passage didn’t catch you, maybe this one will. As the guitars lurch forward and survey their surroundings, a layer of sharp static keeps the performance behind a ring of fire. The riffs are totemic on an album featuring more and more obliqueness, giving precious few opportunities to stand on solid ground.
“Ruinous Paths…” begins with blast beats, rescinding any opportunity to recover before pummeling forward. Rich guitar cycles face headwinds from violent percussion and grueling howls, disrupting any progress with fearsome eruptions. It collapses right into “...to Babylon,” a gnarly coda. “Flowers of Gethsemane” dips from sonorous, pummeling dread into a trance-like doom passage, drawing the tempo back to a glacial pace to mount some much-needed tension before decimating it with the album’s most coordinated violence. The cycle jostles back and forth three times before coming to a cacophonous decline into madness.
Burning in Celestial Poison is a fairly uncomplicated exercise in forgoing traditional song structures to maximize ruthlessness, resulting in an extended meditation on the fiery world that’s becoming more of a reality every day. Rich guitar exercises and rapid-thumping drums are enmeshed in a black haze, imbuing each diversion with a demonic energy that Black Curse never clears away. The brutality never lets up but still feels curated for a richer experience, one where the band fires on all cylinders with a sneer and slips in coordinated withdrawals to feign some sense of safety. The world as Black Curse portrays it is a flaming abyss of terror, oscillating between looming and present disasters, and to their credit, global temperatures keep hurtling upward.