Band:	Dumal
Album:	The Confessor
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	August 31, 2020
A review by:	RaduP

01. Devour The Child
02. Some Ritual
03. Black Tendrils Of Christ
04. Through Fields Of Peasant Graves
05. Unrealized Dreams
06. Ossuaric Inversion
07. Amalgamation: Time, Space, And Circumstance

Innovation and bring the sound forward is definitely important, and black metal especially did that in spades the past decade. But it's not like there isn't any attention worth giving to bands who just aren't having none of that.

Dumal join my list of |black metal bands whose debuts impressed me but I didn't get to review them so I'm reviewing them now" alongside Ars Magna Umbrae and Decoherence and Lord knows who else. I saw 2017's The Lesser God get a fair amount of hype in certain black metal circles, but at the time I didn't really get why. And maybe even today I lack the proper black metal vocabulary to express what made that album special or why it didn't appeal to me as much back then. In the meantime I listened to a lot more 90s black metal other than the big names and I'm starting to understand that it wasn't all as steamlined as I thought it was, but I still feel like I only touched a bit under the surface. And me still not properly feeling The Confessor might have to do with that.

People more versed in 90s black metal might be able to tell apart their influences more neatly than me, since I do feel a bit of American (think Judas Iscariot), Scandinavic (think Arckanum and Taake), part Slavic (think early Behemoth and Drudkh) and even some French this time (think Mütiilation). I might be way off about these, and I'm sure there are plenty of other bands from these scenes or others that Dumal know infinitely better than me. And this is the feeling that I get from The Confessor, like it was clearly made by a bunch of guys really and honestly passionate about 90s black metal, who could probably endlessly school me about who had the best riffs back in the day, who had the rawest atmosphere, and most importantly which ones were only edgy and which ones were actually for real.

The sound may be all encompassing for all those different scenes I mentioned, but Dumal's sound doesn't neatly fall in any of those despite feeling very cohesive. Though it absolutely sounds like an album that could've been made in the 90s, raw production and songwriting style and all, it is almost like seeing a silent movie in the modern age. And a lot of bands love the 90s, just ask every Burzum and Graveland apologist, but it's not enough to just have an excuse for your lack of originality, one must also make rehashes that are actually good, and this is where Dumal's appeal likely comes from. Just like the Baudelaire reference in their name, [Les Fleurs] Dumal found the beauty in the ugliness of black metal, and they definitely understood what made it great in the first place. They know why the atmosphere has to be raw, why the vocals need to be anguished, why the riffs must be repetitive and minimalist, but still retain a sense of melody.

And as hard as it is to make "plain old black metal" in a day and age when the sound has been overly saturated with cheaply face-painted bands that curse at Christians, Dumal might've brought some new life to a stale genre without having to innovate in any way other than feeling fully genuine.