Band:	Black Cilice
Album:	Banished From Time
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	March 10, 2017
Guest review by:	LuciferOfGayness

01. Timeless Spectre
02. On the Verge Of Madness
03. Possessed By Night Spirits
04. Channeling Forgotten Energies
05. Boiling Corpses

Reinventing a genre is often done by highlighting one of the central aspects of the genre. Deathspell Omega highlighted dissonance to promote what today is modern black metal. Black Cilice has always found its inspiration in the production of raw black metal - its sound pays tribute to murky black metal cellars in the early '90s. But Black Cilice is something else than a raw black metal band. It has been called a sound artist because of its focus on the production and the sounds within the music. The mix between being a raw black metal band and having the production of a sound artist on their new album, Banished From Time, is what makes the style of raw black metal interesting again.

On their 2015 release Mysteries, we could hardly tell what was the vocals and what was the guitar, but the sounds sounded like black metal. Mysteries had a very strange production; it was an album that highlighted the strangeness of black metal. Sometimes I forget just how strange black metal is as a genre. Any black metal fan who listens to the genre every day can sometimes forget how strange and inconvenient the sounds are that some of the bands produce. Mysteries was an album that highlighted the strangeness of black metal and made most black metal sound fresh again.

The 4th full-length album, Banished In Time, is a bit less sound art and bit more traditional black metal, but most of the technical stuff is still there. The repetitive loops that build atmosphere, nocturnal hollows, lo-fi, did I say nocturnal? The production is still a long way from crystal clear; it still makes us associate it with black metal cellars in the early '90s, but it has been sharpened. The sounds have moved a bit out of their obscurity and there is a clear distinction between the reverb vocals and the riffs. The production relates to BCs earlier releases but highlights a different aspect of Black Cilice. The biggest change on BfT is that the bass drum is audible, which gives the album a heavier sound than previous releases. On earlier albums the shrieks and riffs would sink in to each other like a floating mass. This is also the case on BfT, but now the bass drum intensifies the other elements on the album, making it a bit less esoteric. It may sound like a small change, but for a band like Black Cilice that operates with subtle moves, it has big effects. Overall, Banished From Time is a more enjoyable album than earlier Black Cilice releases and it is one of the best albums in a growing genre.

The thing I like most with BfT is that it makes me question why this type of black metal hypnotizes me to a greater degree than most other metal. Last year's masterful release from Wóddréa Mylenstede had the same effect on me; the same goes for Candelabrum and Turia. All of these bands play a kind of hypnotic black metal that draws its listener in to its hypnotic cradle. The answer could of course be technical - the album uses hooks, repetition and a production that slowly draws you into its obscurity. But music is a drug, and if you use the same drug on a regular basis you will slowly get immune. As with any good art, innovative music gives you the opportunity to lose yourself within its hypnotic spell.