With four songs about ten minutes long in average, very fast guitar riffs that manages to embrace outstandingly dark, but nevertheless nefarious poignant melodies, bitter pungent sharp razorblade hellish vocals, and exceedingly straightforward fast rhythms, Lathspell built with Torn Cold Void an exciting new masterpiece in Black Metal history. You can be sure you will never listen in your life a Black Metal album that creates with such an infallible degree of authenticity this level of remarkable originality, using as tools of its compositions all the traditional elements of the genre, although in astonishingly surprising forms, creating a musical identity built on a furious consolidation between raw mechanism and instinctive soul. A perfect fusion with the classical traits with a protuberating ability to highly insinuate their own special sound to the genre seems to be the main force of this album, that rearranges, reinvents and destabilizes all conventional Black Metal elements, in such a high vitality of fast directly streams of dense insidious rhythmic insinuations, that the vigorous harmonic brutality of the music rapidly strikes you in the face, without pity or remorse. And you will feel extremely grateful for it. Oh, be sure you will.
The vigorous intensity of the music is the main element of the album. Nonetheless, all of its components are arranged in such an impeccable form, with a so highly visible impenetrable skeleton of outlined virtuosity, that it’s impossible not to feel astounded when you listen to the Torn Cold Void. The darkest emotions and the infamous excitement of the record are quite palpable throughout the music, and as the rapture of its insanely continual draft of incisions keeps revolving, you will be more and more highly amazed with the intense vociferating rhythm of their music, that doesn’t took for granted the deleterious conventional traditions of Black Metal, but aim to continually push forward the boundaries of a new expectation of sonorous configuration, turning this insanely dark style of music into the uttermost solid, distinctive and poetic type of art you will ever going to hear in your life.
Never renouncing the primordial brutality of extreme riffs and reverberating tonalities of aggressive darkness, Lathspell created in Torn Cold Void four masterly delineated operatic wrathful symphonies of unparalleled primary greatness in Black Metal history. Although beautiful and sorrowful harmonies lay hidden underneath the dark notes of every fatalistic layout of energetic impulses, driven by the overwhelmingly intrinsic ambitions that surrounds the visible patterns of their music, they’ve managed to draft, design and generate a very personal overview of Black Metal, so true to the technical baseline of its roots, but nevertheless upgrading the originality of their proposal, that Torn Cold Void is destined to become a cult classic, as well as an underground reference, in the years to come. Its furious darkness, passionate originality, aggressive guitar riffs, and distinctive authenticity generates not only a new breathtaking point in the history of Black Metal, but became a solid and vigorous proposal of an endless compromise to the genre, never looking back to the old days with a nostalgia look. As long as Lathspell remains active, the good old days of BM will never be gone.
Certainly one of the best Black Metal albums of 2016, Torn Cold Void proves why Lathspell is not just another Black Metal band, but one of the genre’s main definitions: Lathspell and Black Metal are one. BM fans will never be disappointed with this amazing band, that expands in the cold border of its sound the genuine atmosphere of an infinite night, that leaves to the eternal moon the howling void of an ancestral sorrow. Managing to perfectly blend the more artistic and poetic elements of the genre with its most pervasive and aggressive side, with such a high degree of authority, experience and competence, Lathspell, with Torn Cold Void, certainly has managed to create one of the most significant, beautiful and true to the principles Black Metal albums of the 21st century, a feature that a lot of their peers will find hard to match! For BM fans, it’s mandatory, groundbreaking, compulsory, extraordinary! Torn Cold Void is an album that expands the borders of the genre, without distorting it. Summarizing: it is true State-of-the-Art Black Metal. Do yourself a favor, and don’t pass by life without listening to it!
Wagner