Panzerfaust‘s adventure grows.
The group began in 2005, and almost 20 years later, Brock Van Dijk (guitar/vocals), Goliath (vocals), Thomas Gervais (bass) and Alexander Kartashov (drums) announce The Suns of Perdition – Chapter IV: To Shadow Zion, their sixth album, via Eisenwald.
The album opens with the ominous sounds of The Hesychasm Unchained, which quickly throws us into the vortex of darkness created by the obvious dissonance and the two oppressive howls. Deliberately not very accessible, the band’s sound will totally hypnotize receptive listeners and transport our spirits with its unstoppable surge, urging us to continue the adventure with When Even The Ground is Hostile. The composition is immediately aggressive, letting the vocal duo haunt us once again with tortured riffs infused with unhealthy Black Metal, but also with raw Death influences that make them devastating, even during the few calmer moments that lead up to The Damascene Conversions, which is initially quite gentle. The throbbing sound slowly floats around us before gradually flaring up, then returning to the fury of the vocals, but there are still a few moments of soothing as when they are joined by Ahmet Ihvani‘s baglama, adopting a mystical touch before the darkness invades us once more. The rhythm remains fairly ethereal until Occam’s Fucking Razor takes its place, leaving mysterious incantation-like choirs to accompany us through this first section, but as usual the band imbues us with their apocalyptic virulence, punctuated by a few melancholy sounds to create a fascinating contrast. Percussion dresses up the end of the track, which is followed by To Shadow Zion (No Sanctuary), which carries us along in its tumultuous race between overpowering vociferations, cold leads and the permanent intense approach that makes the eleven-minute composition fly away in what seems like a fragment of a second, thus bringing this record to a close.
As luck would have it, my first experience of The Suns of Perdition – Chapter IV: To Shadow Zion was a live performance in which the band played two excerpts, which blew me away. Listening to this album only confirms what I already thought: Panzerfaust is a true monster of visceral darkness.
95/100
