Back when I first started getting into metal more seriously, Carach Angren felt like one of the most popular newer bands around, even just judging by how many times I've seen songs like "Bloodstains On The Captain's Log", "Bitte Tötet Mich", and "The Funerary Dirge Of A Violinist" shared on Facebook (for our younger readers, sharing songs on Facebook was something people used to do). I got to see them live in 2016 at a pretty big festival in my country and I remember plenty of people I talked to being more excited about them than about the actual headliners. Once that happened, it seemed like all the fanfare around them simply vanished. Maybe it's just that the social media landscape changed and it's harder to gauge what people listen to or are excited about, but the only time I've gotten to encounter Carach Angren again was just seeing Dance And Laugh Amongst The Rotten and Franckensteina Strataemontanus among new releases in their time.
Now with the release of The Cult Of Kariba, I was curious enough to try and make some sense of what caused Carach Angren to lose their stock. It's a release that has a pretty unique position among the band's discography, not only being the first to be released following the departure of core member and drummer Namtar, effectively turning Carach Angren into a duo, but also until now the band has been very consistent in their release schedule at one release every 2-3 years, and yet this time it's a much smaller release coming five years after the previous one. It does feel like a "make it or break it" moment.
One thing that the release has going for it is that, despite Namtar's departure, a lot of session musicians are recurring cast members in the band's releases, guitarist/bassist Patrick Damiani and violonist Nikos Mavridis contributing to many of the band's releases since Lammendam, narrator Tim Wells also having provided it for the previous album, and drummer Gabe Seeber, while being the only one to make his first contributions to a proper release, has been a live member for a couple of years, so the band's status as a duo feels more like a formality than anything.
Looking back at Carach Angren's back catalog, the quality drop between Where The Corpses Sink Forever and This Is No Fairytale is one that the band never recovered from, but also one that's hard to properly articulate, but the best way I can put it is an emphasis on being overly dramatic rather than on good songwriting. The Cult Of Kariba doesn't exactly reverse course, but its shorter runtime gives the band less room to give into their most questionable tendencies, and, to their credit, it does offer moments where the sound works.
For a symphonic black metal record, The Cult Of Kariba has a sound that is extremely busy and spastic, often jumping from section to section and introducing new elements. While a lot of them come from a symphonic lineage that is reminiscent of Dimmu Borgir most of all, there's a dramatic sense that's imbued in the orchestration, the melodies, and especially in the cleaner vocals and choirs that gives it a gothic edge, making it sound like Cradle Of Filth on speed with better vocals. The shorter structure of the release makes any deviation have a larger share of the runtime, from the very cheesy narrative intro to the industrial tendencies of Franckensteina Strataemontanus returning on "Ik Kom Uit Het Graf", one that still feels like a questionable direction from the band, but one that still has some potential.
The pendulum still doesn't fully swing towards the "We're so back!" direction, and while The Cult Of Kariba doesn't make me think that Carach Angren are going to reach the same heights of their peak ever again, it does prove that there's still mileage left in their sound more than two decades after their first release. Though I suspect it is because I had to listen to it for this review, this is the most fun I've had with a new Carach Angren since I saw them live.
