Band's List Black Metal Benighted Leams Astral Tenebrion

I would like to give this album 20/20….. BUT I’m going to deduct 10 points for bad execution, and 5 points for the artist himself. Leaving 5 points for some good ideas and production. So we’ll look at the musician, Alex. Beanighted Leams was founded by Alex Kurtagic, owner of Supernal music label and distro. I used to love flicking through his distro catalogues in the mid to late 90’s and I bought some real gems from it. But as time went on he started concentrating on and stocking more dull un-inspiring nationalistic/fascist raw black metal. He seems to be Nationalistic,and supports the far right movement despite the fact he is Spanish born with a Croatian father, and has lived in 4 different countries and now lives in the UK, so that annoys me a bit.

Now for the music. It’s supposed to be space ambient metal, but has turned out more of a jumble of ideas. It certainly lacks the claustrophobic brain crushing heaviness of Darkspace for sure. The first point of criticism is the vocals. He is not that great at clear singing which sadly makes up 99% of his vocals. His voice is pretty flat, and buried a bit low in the mix. It’s more singing quietly in the shower than anything else and occasionally he’ll let off a massive scream which scares the crap out of you because it is so much louder than the rest of the vocals or music.

Musically, it’s pretty sloppy and the tracks all sound quite similar with no real stand out tracks. The guitaring is actually pretty good and he does have some good ideas sometimes, but the drum machine is pretty flat and artificial sounding, chaotic, but one dimensional in the fast parts. When it slows down the drumming becomes overly technical to a point where it doesn’t make sense and starts to fall apart.

On the positive side, the production is good and the ambience is cleverly done with the guitar being allowed to play on it’s own quietly with a space like echo, and it sounds quite effective, and even though the album last over 50 minutes for some reason it seems to go by quicker. It’s not the most un-listenable album, possible un-fathomable, but not un-listenable.