Turdus Merula – “Herbarium” – [Le Crepuscule Du Soir]

Don’t let hippy-dippy cover art and unintentionally hilarious band name (which is actually the latin name of the Common Blackbird) fool you: 2009 debut of Gothenberg, Sweden one-woman project (although she herself uses ‘one-man’) is pretty traditional, aggressive black metal, ambient tendencies notwithstanding. Mastermind ‘Disa’ (also of Murmurs) plays everything but drums, which get top-line treatment from session dude ‘Draug.’ Ritual begins with about 2 1/2 minutes of classical piano, then gives way to black metal that falls near Belketre, demo-era Black Funeral, Burzum, Abyssic Hate, Odz Manouk and Leviathan, with scene-specific elements from Marduk, Nastrond et al. T.1 returns to the piano for its last 3 1/2 minutes, and the last track (the outro I guess) is another piano piece, but the rest is a big old darksome morass of spacey guitar, furious drumming and enough keyboards to occasionally sound like Emperor. Quite a few times it gets slow and ‘depressive’ for extended passages, but mostly it pummels exhilarantly away. Cleanly produced (Sweden), but also well-produced, which goes a long way, and definitely still murky enough for me. Trax take their time: 6 is the only one (besides outro) under 10 min. Get a Swedish-speaker to tell you what the lyrics are about: I bet darkness, sadness, nature etc. By the way, a herbarium is a collection of dried plant specimens, and for what it’s worth, all these songs are named for poisonous plants.