Mania & Huldrekall "Split"

A fucking awesome split between a band that i love, Mania, and Huldrekall, from i barely know nothing about. Mania delivers two awesome and twisted tracks, while the first track "Manifesting Dark Energy", takes us at warp speed into this chaotic and psychedelic journey thru Mania's twisted mind, the second track "Collapse of Spiraling Iteration II" is a more slow paced, almost doom-ish track, before the floor cracks opens at our feet and we are swollen by the ground into the fires of Hell. Mania really knows how to make his stuff.. so good, so breathtaking, so outstanding. Huldrekall bring in their bag, three good tracks as well, they got that Demo sound that i'm sure it will please fans of Ash Borer and Fell Voices. The guys over Eternal Warfare gave this for FREE, that's right, but it's available in physical copy that you can grab here in order to raise your cassette collection. I'm telling you, this one is really worth it. An awesome split i haven't heard in a while. Recommended!

M | H | the void of eternal bleakness

Mania

Mania is a black/doom metal project from Oregon. Since the project's formation back in 2004, main brain Nate Myers has released one previous full-length and several splits and demos. This is Mania's third full-length, after a split up of its members, now is Nate Myers only. This self titled album essentially takes straightforward black metal, doom metal, and ambient music, and blends them together. Within each of those three genres is an abundance of sub-genres, which actually manage to get pulled into here as well. While I'd never call this album progressive, it is certainly adventurous and exploratory. There are moments on here that are blazing blast-beats while other parts focus more on clean guitar lines with more atmosphere.

About half of this album is essentially a black metal record, the kind that has a lot of pounding double-bass and blast-beats kind, while the other half features a slower melancholic sort of tone, the doom stuff. If you haven't guessed by now, it's the cleaner, more soft moments that I find more intriguing about this project, as with a lot of other groups as well. Overall, I'd call this a nice, solid record, it has some really cool tracks that really stick out, but there are others that just sort of fall into the gray. I would consider checking this out if you like black metal that isn't too left-field, but a little adventurous.

nevermind the shitty cover