Death Metal Album each week: Tenebrarum - Alta Magia ~ Music is the Best

After hermetic silence, we go back to the arid plains of Jalisco, Mexico, in search of the chilling touch of undead spirit that permeated cult satanic Death Metal glory in Sargatanas’ debut album “The Enlightenment”, painstakingly detailed in our feature on the background and Weltanschauung of Mexican metal. Around the same time as Sargatanas, the essentially Latin American method of death, mysticism and underworld powers was invoked by the rather short-lived Tenebrarum who left nothing but a legacy of 1 curious album. In consistency and endurance they would be overshadowed by their brothers, but “Alta Magia” is drenched having a creative, possessed instinct which makes it worthy of the mystic title. Stylistically somewhere between the chaotic pathos of dark skinned warriors of Mystifier and Italian black metallers enthusiastic about organs, masses and interludes, Tenebrarum juxtaposed noisy riffs and soothing breathing lapses in order to produce cerebral pleasure in annihilation of opposite principles.

Early Black Metal were rather founded in Death Metal or Grindcore technique but an instinct for elongated, languid, even feminine architecture injected it with an atmosphere of subtle terror and reverence. “Alta Magia” goes for a simultaenous assault on senses and reason because they build a Mortuary-like foundation of extremely dramatic and nuanced simple chromatic riffs, along with which corny synthesizers exercise diverse pagan rituals as though in mockery of “vampire metal”, yet in their intensity and rather precise musical formulation approximating probably the most otherworldly moments of Nocturnus or even the classic progressive rock of Jacula. Some of the simpler riffs are only provocative, however the band isn't one to exercise blocky repetition in the way of Sargatanas; instead it takes delight in shock and explosiveness. This improbable, mercurial album is mostly recommended to Death Metal fans with an affection for the stylistic tenets of early Grindcore and Black Metal, as displayed for example within the ridiculous excesses of Blasphemy, Beherit and Imprecation.