STRANGLING FROM WITHIN

Norvegian black metal band EMPEROR (defunct since 2001) obviously has been a prolific source for highly talented musicians with an artistic pretension going far beyond their original genre's limits. Guitarist Tomas Thormodsæter Haugen (aka Samoth) joined ARCTURUS in 1993, bassist Terje Vik Shei (aka Tchort) played guitars together with GREEN CARNATION and Bård G. Eithun (aka Faust) contributed drums on ULVER's "Perdition City" album. Now then PECCATUM is a project of EMPEROR's second guitarist Vegard Sverre Tveitan (aka Ihsahn) joining forces with his wife and his brother-in-law. Their gritty and ambitious debut "Strangling From Within" is a quite extreme avant-gardistic type of work which will certainly not appeal to the common black metal fan. Being in its music style not too far away from ARCTURUS' stuff (just imagine addition of female vocs) it's in parts a difficult to access tightrope walk between theatrical drama, classical, industrial and black metal. Especially the female vocals which contribute mainly to the strongly classical touch of this album are reaching at times pitches that might hard to be supported by some more sensitive ears. The album is divided up in two chapters where tracks 1-5 make up the first and tracks 6-9 the second one. The multilayered compositions display throughout a quite maniac and depressive atmosphere, a kind of desolation and emptiness that will most probably not appeal to fans of standard melodic prog metal but I'd highly recommend this album to any open-minded music lover with an affinity to rather insane black/death metal. Especially the ones who are into Scandinavian avant metal scene will like it. Maybe not to be called an essential one necessarily since it's rather an acquired taste but anyway an excellent debut deserving some more attention actually.