Phantom - Blight Corpse Necromancy

Taking in cryptic influence from the raw black metal of the debut Divine Necromancy, Phantom applies the lead-picked melodies of atmospheric horror at times reminiscent of Dark Ascension Of Erebos in dark and fast morbid music, harmonizing in the style of black metal legends Burzum but without the circular songwriting, creating the atmospheric equivalent of touring otherworldly pits of hell where consciousness flows in sentential form parallel to the terror unleashed through Phantom's sinister music. Although credited with launching the "Phantom Metal" sound, on a structural level Blight Corpse Necromancy resurrects the unnerving atmospheric death metal of odd chord shapes and offtime rhythms, similar in a way to Infester's masterpiece To the Depths, in Degradation but with more emphasis on disharmonic continuity, and instead directs it toward sculpting longer songs from interlocking melodies with a sublime exalting sense of context producing enduring macabre atmosphere.

With Blight Corpse Necromancy, Phantom achieves two threads with this gruesome and utterly demonic style of songwriting: ethereal vision, or song structures that follow a narrative of morbid discovery, and a putrid atmosphere, which is the shifting complex of moods created by following decaying and claustrophobic melodies that silhouette rather than delineate an eerie and entrancing tonal shape. A parallel complex rhythmic technique, reminiscent of what Vermin and Incantation were attempting at the same time, expands the range of ghoulish continuity accepted in variable strings of disturbing and mesmerizing riffs inlaid sequentially to sustain the melodic trauma of a granular and isolated dynamic fluctuations of consistency toward eternal sepulchral atmospheric tendencies.

Like a sweeping underworld driven rainfall, this vision of pestilential melodies hides behind a violent death metal riffing wedged between the more "melodic", black metal trademark tremelo lead atmosphere. Blight Corpse Necromancy of course offers rhythmic breaks, not in a suspension of monstrosity but in a crossover as the band manages to transfer the devilish energetic tension between sanity-wrecking, all-destroying, anti-human forces. There will never be an album as macabre and grotesque as this masterpiece of horror aptly named Blight Corpse Necromancy.

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