Label: Necroeucharist Productions

Date: April 21st, 2023

And now the kind of stuff I always liked very much or even loved reviews I will. Splits has a long tradition and I somehow feel they were the most popular in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the century we live in at the moment. This kind of release was and still is an underground thing. That’s why bands like, here my principal will be broken and I’ll name some bands’ names, Incantation, Nunslaughter, Blood and so on never stopped to be ensembles strongly connected with, let’s call it, unofficial scene. But the main topic of my scribble is what we have to do on the right this split with. Well, since most of us (including myself) hear about both Dominion of Suffering and Phobonoid for the first time, then I guess it’d be a brilliant idea to write something about creatures itself, too. Both of them present us music we can call in general black metal. But those are two slightly different faces of this music as well.

However, let’s start from the most important information. I mean the fact split contains six tracks – every component gave three ones as well. The first one we can hear is Dominion of Suffering. Band has existed since 2008 and comes from the biggest city and at the same time the most important economic center of Switzerland, even if the band’s roots are in Košice. Here’s of course no place to write about the history of both cities and stuff like that. That’s why I’ll directly focus on what’s the most and actually the only important thing here – music itself. As I mentioned before this split is the very first meeting with this ensemble. And I tell you what, when I heard these three songs for the first time, I was not even surprised, but a little angry at myself. I knew nothing about this band before. And since they have existed since 2008 I probably should do it. The fact is I’m not as hard fucked in my head on the point of black metal as in case of thrash or death. Reason of such state of affairs is probably fact I heard in my life even too many hordes or projects who just didn’t know what their instruments are for, who completely couldn’t play them and were proud of that talking around, in my opinion, bullshits this is (the same like NS views) something what Black Art is about. Anyways, music we hear first on this split is intensive and Dominion of Suffering has no mercy at all for our ears. Somehow you can say this creativity is primitive one, but that’s not about technical skills of musicians as well. I think it has quite a lot to do with old bands from Germany or Switzerland – at least more than with Norwegian ones, I guess. You can also find some elements of death, but in my opinion they’re not too huge. This is mostly about some guitar and so on tricks, maybe some vocalizations, but it’s still not too easy to recognize it. Generally guys serve to us fast tempo with no compromises and showing mercy to listeners.

Another three tracks are created and played by Lord Phobos who’s the only member of Phobonoid. As I know there were never some other guys who played there and it means I don’t know if I can call it a band. Now this is just a project in my orthodox opinion. By the way, the most important thing is music itself, so let’s leave this academic debate if there’s something called “one man band” or not. And music is  quite interesting I have to say. Probably the reason why this is like that lies in fact he combines black metal with some little touch of doom. Well, actually doom influences aren’t too huge, too. Michele Stocco’s creativity is in various tempo, but mostly the middle one and technically developed enough. We have on here more atmosphere, in my opinion diabolic. His part of this split begins and ends with something I’d call intro and outro, even if they’re integral parts of tracks. Here I see (hear) dark wave with its demonic and at the same time sci-fi character. Well,at least I am the one who can hear  this second one here.

To sum up, I have to say this released by Slovak Necroeucharist Productions split is a good one and it was, well, still it is, a perverse pleasure to listen to it! I’ll surely go back to  this as often as possible, because both acts present interesting music. Unfortunately for me this is only a digital version label offers, at least at the moment.