Gast - Mörkret Kallar

Gast provide a small, appetizing offering of wholesome Swedish black metal on the seven tracks of their twenty-seven-minute debut. Brief, but well-condensed to maximal potency, Mörkret Kallar is a direct, powerful, and uncompromising offering of black metal at some of its thickest and most aggressive, with vocals that growl the curses of infliction of suffering more than the screams of the reception of that suffering and brutish, yet nimble when necessary, guitar work lacing the album’s more spiritual moments.

The opening track, “Distans”, sets the stage for the onslaught of blackened abrasion though the dissonant riffage and tremolo rhythms set in place by the guitars for the drums to back up with thrash beats, blasts, and tasteful floor tom accents and fills. It’s one of the more standard black metal cuts on the album, yet from here on out it only gets more merciless.

The down-tuned groove that ensues after the clean guitar intro of the second track, “Avgrund”, isn’t something usually found in black metal of this kvlty brand, but it works surprisingly (well, not all that surprisingly) well for the crushingly heavy style the band employ. Meanwhile the very Gevurah-esque “Under Satans Vingar” makes brief, but similarly crushing use of the low tuning as well.

The gothically acoustic interlude, “Trancendens”, provides not so much a needed break from the black metal distortion, but a prelude to the viscera of “Där Livet Kvävs”, which embodies the fiercer, faster side of Scandinavian black metal through torturous blast beats and wailing guitar dissonance. The subsequent tremolo spiraling of “Morgonstjärna” channels the likes of Gorgoroth in its initial war march and even DSBM a la Leviathan with its blend of low-register guitar grooves and dizzying tremolo picking.

The closing song, “Sorgens Skugga”, finds the band flexing some compositional muscle by wrapping all of what made the preceding songs so excellent together in a massively delicious and well arranged piece of black metal prowess.

Mörkret Kallar is a wonderfully bold and effective black metal debut, confident in its creative choices and one which makes itself addictive both through a desire to unwrap is layers and a desire to bask once more in its dark sonic ceremonies. Though short as it may be, I’d rather have a brief record as tight as this than one watered down by lack of creativity. Gast is certainly a band worth checking out, and a young face in the sea of Scandinavian black metal worth keeping an eye on because this is one of the best releases I’ve heard so far this year.