Hailing from the United Kingdom, REVENANT MARQUIS is a mysterious yet incredibly prolific entity. Having just revealed its first public work in 2018, the aptly titled Pitiless Black Emphasis album, two more full-lengths quickly followed, Polterngyst and Anti Universal Compassion, both in 2019. This trifecta of albums displayed a restless ghoul firmly in the grips of the rawest black metal possession, but dispensing with terror and truth with almost preternatural ease. Now making a blood pact with INFERNA PROFUNDUS, REVENANT MARQUIS adds to that canon of foulness with Youth in Ribbons. Challenging and defiant, once more does REVENANT MARQUIS return from the sequestered black waters of Wales with Youth in Ribbons: a long-play collection of raw black metal necromancy that serves to bring the tortured, the forgotten, and the abused back from the choking abyss. There is no space for hope nor light in this assembly of rituals, as the listener must break bread with the maligned forces that lurk eternally waiting for granted passage. This is not music, but rather a covenant between the listener and the spectral realm. As such, riffs seemingly slice the listener's skin yet retain an elusive, almost-ethereal quality. There is power and propulsion here, too, but never does it feel like rote "violence" for its own sake; rather, any physicality or momentum is upended into a hypnotic disconnect that keeps that listener enthralled - literally, in thrall to REVEVANT MARQUIS' diabolic conjurations. The title itself, Youth in Ribbons, is quite telling of the virtual deflowering at hand here, debasing the listener with ever-apparent 'n' arrogant disregard for comfort. A suffocating netherworld, beckoning ever so tantalizingly...indeed, "The Incorporeal Hallways." UK black metal is continually being renewed, continually cycling through new generations of devotees - and pretenders. REVENANT MARQUIS cares not for contemporaries, neither domestically nor abroad; only the experience of black metal's most sacred sensations matter. With Youth in Ribbons, figuratively and again literally, REVENANT dares you to discover the profound and the profane in that experience.
