First things first: Look at that cover art. Hang on, hang on, let’s make sure we’re looking at it properly. Click on this, and then LOOK. AT. THAT. If that’s not precisely the sort of beatific darkness that got you interested in this whole mess of a thing we call heavy metal in the first place, then friend, I suggest you get your iconography sorted.
More to the point, though, Towards Eschaton is the debut full-length from the British God-botherers in Craven Idol, and even more to the point, it rips, snorts, stomps, and then goes the hell home. This is riotously diabolical black/thrash metal that leans harder toward black than thrash, so start thinking a bit more Nifelheim or Desaster than Aura Noir or Nekromantheon. Craven Idol don’t score a ton of points for innovation, but if this style is your thing, then, pheeeeew, brothers and sisters, this album is your THING.
Affiliated with the also excellent Scythian via guitarist/vocalist Immolator of Sadistik Wrath (yessss), Craven Idol unleashes a wicked melodic sense and some truly nasty, bile-soaked vocals across these eight tunes. The songs do end up feeling like loosely stitched-together collections of kick-ass parts, rather than naturally unfolding songs, but that said, when the individual parts kick this much ass, it’s a relatively minor complaint.
Can we also acknowledge, for the sake of posterity, that thirty-four minutes is pretty much the perfect duration for an utterly rampaging black/thrash album such as this? And then, even if your puny reptilian brain somehow manages to find itself bored, take heart, because a shit-kicking guitar solo break is rarely far away. Craven Idol cavorts through plenty of variety, though, even given the strictures of genre orthodoxy. “Golgotha Wounds” blasts out of the gates with a momentum that recalls De Mysteriis dom Sathanas, while the calm mid-section of opening track “To Mayrion” features some sparse chanting and meditative noodling. Elsewhere, the sheer guitar-gasm glee in “Aura of Undeath” is off the charts. (The charts of how much fun one is usually allowed to heavy in such superficially serious music, that is.)
“Sworn Upon the Styx” cuts with quick, impatient rhythmic bites. Interestingly, give it a different guitar tone, and you could almost pass it off as an outtake from the latest Grave album, which once again demonstrates how tenuous (or at least arbitrary) the division between black and death metal can be. “Craven Atonement,” meanwhile, has a false ending at about a minute and a half in, which makes way for a pit-inciting breakdown so crucial it could make Bolt Thrower blush. Little touches like this are basically love letters to heavy metal itself, so strap in to this album and get ready to smile all around.
Basically, Towards Eschaton is the kind of album where, even if you don’t follow underground metal particularly closely, a devotion to the whiplash-inducing madness of prime Slayer and Bathory is all the context you should need to enjoy the ever-living hell out of it. The album’s closing track “Orgies” winds things down with a pretty succinct mission statement/valediction: “Rain down! Rain down…death!”
In, out, done. You’re a grouch if you can’t get down with this gnarled noise.
