Boleskine House has just emerged.
Born in 2019 from the minds of Niccolò Misrachi (all instruments, Ekku) and Raven Borsi (vocals), the project takes five years to give life to its debut album, Miserabilist Blues, released by Masked Dead Records.
Black House Painters begins with a certain quietude, but it’s not long before we’re submerged beneath its waves of ethereal blackness, coupled with terrifying howls. The tenebrous ocean surges forward, then slows down and is adorned with dissonance, before accelerating again with scathing leads, then offering us a rather contemplative passage, mixing its influences before injecting a touch of melancholy into the opening moments of Need, the next composition. Aggressive vocals contrast with a relatively soothing rhythmic pattern, particularly in the ethereal slow moments disturbed by bass and drums, before A Place To Mourn Forever opens with a sampled dialogue, immediately invading us with its visceral, penetrating darkness. The rhythm gradually fades away, only to return in a more majestic fashion, then sporadically flares up again, before finally reverting to that persistent wall of oppression from which a sharp solo emerges, but the final is still a long way off, which allows the riffs to stop and start one last time, leaving the piano to carry us through to When You Sleep, a cover of English Shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine, to which the duo give a new, darker as hazy and heady as ever identity.
Boleskine House forge their identity by drawing on the most ethereal elements of Black and Doom Metal. Miserabilist Blues takes us through desolate landscapes and is sure to find an audience receptive to its soaring riffs.
90/100