There’s a chance you’ve heard this one before. That is, if you’ve been even half-attentive to the prevailing currents in contemporary black metal over the past decade or so, the general sounds that emerge from Lake Of Blood’s second album, Omnipotens Tyrannus, will feel already comfortable and lived-in. To be more precise: It’s pretty easy to plot the lineage of this vein of expansive, heavily atmospheric black metal by tracing a more or less direct line, first from Weakling to Wolves in the Throne Room and Altar of Plagues, and now to Ash Borer, Fell Voices, and Lake Of Blood.
The Californian five-piece stands out from this current crop of practitioners because they are nowhere near as blurry or droning; the music is clearly recorded, with crisp separation of instrumental voices, and songs that move from section to section with something occasionally approaching grace. Blastbeats are the default drum style, and the two guitarists are spinning out slowly shifting melodic tremolo lines more often than not, but there’s an uncanny sense of song dynamics at work, which means that there’s almost always a drum fill, full band stop, half-time break, or rock riff just around the corner to keep things spooling irresistibly forward.
The album features guest contributions from former Sutekh Hexen member Scott Miller, and Wrest of Leviathan, with Miller providing subtle but effective noise/ambient song transitions and samples, and Wrest providing additional guitar and vocals on two songs. The unique, fatalistic atmosphere that results from the collision of the band’s muscular black metal and these other sound sources means that in many places, Omnipotens Tyrannus sounds like the fully metallic ghost of Lurker of Chalice. This, of course, is a wondrous thing.
Omnipotens Tyrannus’s biggest hurdle for many listeners will likely be its length: this is basically eighty minutes of aggressively melancholic black metal. No matter how good the music, eighty minutes is too long for basically any album that hopes to keep a stern hold on the listener’s attention. Still, in this case, the excessive length gets turned around, a potentially fatal weakness become secret weapon. For as much as Lake Of Blood impresses with compositional smarts, a great strength of the album lies in its sheer willingness to overwhelm and overpower the listener. If you’re willing to give yourself over to the deep pool of atmosphere that rises like a dense fog from each shimmering surface of the album, that chore of an eighty-minute running time becomes a gift, an isolation chamber that promises either terror or restorative meditation. Either way, it will not leave you unmoved.
Because of its length and immersive nature, trying to pick out highlights is a mostly futile task. Nevertheless, the late-album tandem of “Tyrannus” and “Omnipotens” deserves special mention. “Tyrannus” opens with a patient twang that briefly hints at the morose glory of Earth’s HEX and The Gault’s Even As All Before Us before it vaults into a bent-riff vortex. “Omnipotens” seems to offer some initial resolution, but then spends the majority of its second half squeezing the listener through a bruisingly dissonant labyrinth that feels it exists on some alternate plane at the intersection of Esoteric and Blut Aus Nord.
So, Omnipotens Tyrannus has got riffs, atmosphere, smarts, and ferocity in ample supply. But more importantly, it has presence. If these sounds are familiar, Lake Of Blood’s deployment of this particular style ekes out a vitality and necessity that escapes many similar bands. There’s always a certain beauty in desolation and resignation, and Lake Of Blood manages to find just the right angle to fire one’s imagination, and to turn a withering gaze of resentment into the face of nothingness. Maybe they spit and maybe they sing, but you can join, and that counts for something.
