BLACK CROW KING: "To Pay the Debt of Nature"

A general overview of my listening habits reveals that most of the music I listen to is black metal and noise, sometimes these two tags attached to same record. Filthiness is indeed a welcome element to my ears and it is certain that there's no shortage of distortion on Black Crow King's debut To Pay the Debt of Nature, a hellish, disorderly affair that leaves nobody cold unless one has serious hearing problems. 

Putting a definite genre on this album becomes challenging: while it is the overall fucked up noise that dominates on the record, there are still, for example, guitars on various tracks on the album, like on the first piece "I, Crow" - but even the rhythm pattern here is seemingly incoherent and messy. There's also plenty of (programmed) percussion on the album, usually in the form of accenting floor tom hits, not to forget the screeching, overbearing vocal delivery that could fit into a black metal record. In addition, the tempo (if that is even a proper term here considering the unstructured nature of the so-called music) which is rather slow conveys something related to doom metal. The whole aspect of musicality is indeed questionable here, but the somewhat structured guitars and bass lines, plus more subtle synth mats and various other effects (like the sweetly executed ethereal piano notes on "Excarnation Ritual") correlate enough with the term 'music', I suppose.

Careful listening of the album reveals multiple layers of sounds, making the album's soundscape quite rich and all this leads me to think that Gnaw Their Tongues is more than an apt reference point here. The nightmarish atmosphere is top-notch but unfortunately that is not enough in crafting a truly successful album. What becomes the Achilles heel is how prolonged To Pay the Debt of Nature is. With one exception, the songs vary between eight and seventeen damn possessed minutes, and I'm afraid the ideas don't carry enough far to justify songs of such monstrous lengths. The differences between songs are, after all, pretty minimal, so I'm not experiencing any moments of amazement when a new track begins because they all seem to revolve around similar focuses on creepy, primordial black noise or whatever you want to call it. To Pay the Debt of Nature is an interesting, perhaps cinematic journey to experience from the beginning to its end, but it's not a film I'd watch regularly over and over again because of its overall length during which nothing enough groundbreaking happens, so to say.

3 / 5