As their journey through the dark continues, the sound of Finland’s Grave With A View just gets harsher and more pitiless. With their new full length album, Raw Illumination, the band have stared long into the abyss of the soul, confronting head on the bitter loneliness and crushing desolation of reality, the grief and pain that await us on our long, weary progress through life. They have embraced the inevitability of violence and death and infused the eight hymns to emptiness and destruction that form Raw Illumination with that essence. There is neither peace nor consolation to be found within this maze of torment, only the chilling winds of anti-life black metal and the jagged claws of Raw Illumination!
Each song on Raw Illumination is a rotten tooth within the mouth of this ravenous musical jackal, each coated in its own particular poison; be it the skin crawling formication of title track, ‘Raw Illumination’ itself, where soul sucking spirits writhe between the bloodstained riffs, or the grim, endless march through a forever of torment that is the doleful despair of ‘Wrest’. There is a black-veined death that runs throughout this album, binding the unsettling tone shifts and fearsome hammer blow beats, the hollowing atmosphere of terror and arsenal of scalding, ferocious riffs together; but each individual nightmare also stands alone, unique tableaus of horror painted in the colours of rot, decay and hopeless solitude. There are no exhilarating vistas of snow topped mountains to be found here, no conflict between glorious immortals, heavens aflame and dark angels on the wing…Raw Illumination is the black metal of dirty needles and stained sheets, knives in filthy alleyways , broken windows and empty rooms, disintegrating minds and slowly stopping hearts. Dying alone…unmourned, unloved and unknown.
Raw Illumination is a formidable album, without a doubt Grave With A View’s most impressive creative achievement to date – and the team that the band surrounded themselves with was carefully chosen. The sound that helps to give these songs their aura of all-consuming loss was achieved by the recording and mixing of O.H.R. and the mastering skills of Haldor Grunberg at Satanic Audio (Behemoth, Dopelord, Christ Agony etc) – his touch allowing the listener to feel the dust and grime beneath their fingers and taste the salt of blood and tears. Meanwhile the striking visuals that reflect the music’s unbalanced, addictive nature were invoked with the help of model Anna Iivana Julma and designer Danny The Destroyer. And behind it all Dusktone, the label that will send Raw Illumination’s murky malevolence out into the world on November 29th. Stay close to the light…something wicked this way comes.
Raw Illumination pre-sales are open now at Dusktone
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