SABBAT The Dwelling - Melody of Death Mask CD

Sabbat's discography is one of the most fertile goldmines I've ever encountered. While their more recent offerings are closer to the hearts of hardcore thrash metal fans such as myself, the brilliancy in their early, purely black metal releases can not be denied. Most especially, on the colossal "The Dwelling". This record is absolutely astonishing when you consider how many ways they could have ruined this record, that one song that's the entire album. But instead, the album that should have been the worst one, turned out to be one of the best ones.

As it's been aforementioned, the entire record is one song, "The Melody of Death Mask". But that one song... it takes so many different forms throughout its nearly 60 minutes. These guys absolutel defied my ideas about what songs could be. This song goes through an absolutely inconceiveable amount of different sections, changes, transitions, and somehow, every one of its faces make perfect sense in the big picture. Most of what you'll hear is fast-paced, thrashy, aggressive ferocity, such as the part at about 9:45. That generally gets followed by a haunting explosion of emotions, like when you hit 22:12, where the music turns into a doom metal-like slow-paced melancholic flow of darkness.

That's only 2 faces of this magnificent record, but there are more. The fericous and the melancholic parts constantly get linked together by outstandingly written instrumental breaks, in which every instruments gets a wonderful display. At roughly 28 minutes, you'll even hear an acoustic guitar break that's magnificently sinister and sad. Among the sorrowful solos and dark bass rumbling, you will even find a PIANO section at roughly 51:55, which is just beyond horrific and chilling. The record just does not let go. It keeps telling you the stories from the abyss and the dark realities of a twisted mind, as you get more and more sucked in the story.

And not necessarily through the lyrics, but the music itself. These riffs were forged in Hell, and somehow through some dark channels of wizardry transported to our Earth. They are relatively easy to play, but they are all the more effective. The sky turns dark red once this starts playing. This proves that for music to be effective, it does not need to me over the top complex. It has to tell a story and has to communicate... THIS is a fucking story! An hour-long atmospheric, masterful, emotional, melancholic black metal story that's never to be repeated or even rivaled.