CEREMONIAL WORSHIP "Seven Gateways To Eternal Misanthropy" [12" LP, Black Vinyl]
2022 - Black Metal from Greece
Detailed Description
Hailing from Hellas itself, CEREMONIAL WORSHIP formed in 2016 and a year later made its public debut with a self-titled EP. The singular creation of one High Priest C.W., CEREMONIAL WORSHIP is the ultimate expression of his individual inner-darkness, which further manifested in another EP in 2018. In 2021, CEREMONIAL WORSHIP delivered its first recording under the banner of ETERNAL DEATH with a split tape with Filipino comrades OMENFILTH, jointly titled The Pact of Morbid Conspiracy. The band's first full-length came at the beginning of 2022, titled Ode to Dionyssus, but in a very limited edition. As such, one could qualify Seven Gateways to Eternal Misanthropy as CEREMONIAL WORSHIP's true full-length debut. Either way you cut it, Seven Gateways to Eternal Misanthropy is a grim and challenging excursion into the darkest depths of - YES - misanthropy. Whereas prior CEREMONIAL WORSHIP recordings exhibited the hallmarks of classic Hellenic black metal - thick, pulsing walls of dread and doom, with simple 'n' straightforward songwriting driving the point home - with Seven Gateways to Eternal Misanthropy, mainman High Priest C.W. goes a more abstracted route. Drums are still primitive and indeed pulsing and his vocals suitably throaty in their anguish, but it's the man's weird, wild riffing that makes the album so eerie and disturbing: at once atonal and melodic, impossibly distant but somehow forceful, with well-timed explosions of melted soloing. Instead of the usual parallels to the "Big Three" of Greek black metal (Rotting Christ, Varathron, Necromantia), we can point to that pivotal scene's stranger outliers like Disharmony, Fiendish Nymph, Zephyrous, and early Vorphalack as aesthetic analogues. Not for this world, not for this time, CEREMONIAL WORSHIP inhabits its own unique void of misery. Step into these Seven Gateways to Eternal Misanthropy and emerge transformed...or ruined.
