Review Summary: Grab yer mace, sharpen thy blade!
As soon as I saw this album cover, I knew I had to listen to this record. (For me, it's one of the best album covers of the year.) Let me clarify a bit: the soldier in black armor on the cover and the album title are clear references to the infamous army in Hungarian history, Matthias Corvinus's Black Legion. So, for someone like me who loves both medieval themes and black metal, this album seemed very promising. Fortunately, my gut feeling proved to be correct, as this album by the Bristol-based Blasfeme turned out to be very strong!
After I visited their earlier releases, I believe this album's title was chosen with a serious purpose: a declaration that the band aims to follow a new direction. What does this mean? Instead of the usual (pathetic?) devil-worship, they drew inspiration from the dark stories of the Middle Ages instead, and in terms of sound, they spiced up the typical black metal tremolos with heavy metal and punk elements. This way,
Black Legion feels significantly more melodic and musically richer than the average. The album features a rawer sound typical of old-school black metal, but this is complemented by excellent studio work that preserves the sharpness of the riffs while ensuring that every instrument and vocals sound perfect and ‘huge’ (thanks to that hall reverb effect, for example). Another strength of the album is that it includes a few rarer ideas, such as incorporating a sample from an old movie at the beginning of the track "Ritualistic Exsanguination" (I have no idea where is that sample from); or the melancholic closing track itself, "Bound by the Blood Upon Our Swords", which is an instrumental piece performed on exclusively acoustic guitars (it also reminded me of Ulver's
Kveldssanger due to the same choice for the instrument, plus I felt the same melancholic atmosphere).
Black Legion is an excellent "everyday" black metal album, which, despite its short runtime (just half an hour), is musically exciting and highly enjoyable — at least for me, it hit the mark in practically every way!
