Label: Morbid Skull Records
Date: August 31st, 2023
El Salvador is not too large country. It’s the second smallest one in Central America. There lives something like six and a half million people, a lot of them in the capital city San Salvador. Life over there is very brutal and can be even dangerous as well, not only in San Salvador of course, even if it’s the worst in bigger cities. So that’s nothing strange. Some people create brutal (in different aspects) music. That’s also nothing strange in the fact that most of the bands are coming just from San Salvador, even if there’re of course ones from Santa Ana and other communities. Anyways, one of them is Conflagracion created in 2019 and except just reviewed debut full-length guys released only one cassette EP entitled “Lucifitias” more or less two years after birth of the ensemble.
Anyways, the album contains seven tracks (two last are instrumental ones). It takes thirty three minutes and twenty one seconds. So as you can see compositions are quite long, even if the first one entitled ”El Llamado De Las Animas” is a little longer than one minute. But this is actually an intro and in this context its length is very accurate in my opinion. By the way, you’d like to get to know what music you should expect here. I think. Well, I somehow am sure the best part of you has a strong feeling what kind of metal this is, just after taking a look at the cover art. And I have to say you’re absolutely right – this is Black Metal in its pure form! Of course if we’d analyze every entire riff, guitar tuning and so on, then we’ll find some touches of other sub-genres of our beloved music. They’d be very delicate, but… However, black metal is not homogeneous genre (there’s not only one way to play it and bands aren’t the same at all, and you don’t need to be real true and so on black metal fan to be able to recognize it; we can find really huge differences between them ), so… This creativity is more about atmospheric playing. Mostly that’s in slow tempo, but at the same time I’d never said it has something to do with Depressive black metal or something like that. Especially guys who know very well how to play faster. And feelings I have while listening to this stuff are much about something monumental and of course dark.
It has a lot to do with the Norwegian way of playing such music. Of course I can also hear some other influences as well. Anyways, creativity isn’t too complicated. Well, in some way this is even a 1uite primitive one. But isn’t it what Black Art is about in general? There’s no place here for some complicated guitar tricks and stuff like that. But if you listen to it in focus, then you’ll notice riffs change quite often, even if they’re, just like it’s welcome in the genre, even easy ones and there are some subtle touches of other genres guitarist and my biddy in one play in his other ensembles. But generally this is exactly how Black Metal should be – music here is something secondary and especially in such Norwegian in the most kind of such creativity it is.
Well, I guess this album released by Morbid Skull Records in several formats August 31st last year will be a tasty morsel for every fan of black metal. It isn’t probably anything very special or original, but is it really something important in this case? Especially for someone who really loves such creativity? I deeply doubt it! By the way, the rest of you will not be extremely interested in spending money on that. But I know I’m not the only one who’s geek and the fact band is coming from the country the most of people absolutely don’t associate with metal (well, I’m somehow sure some of you before reading first lines of this review could even don’t know where El Salvador is exactly located) and even only that’s why they’ll check out the band and their both stuffs! I’ll maybe not come back to this album very often, but surely I do from time to time – mostly because I’m more into another sub-genres of our beloved music.
