Label: UKEM Records
Origin: Scarborough, United Kingdom
Advancements in technology combined with increasingly listless album cover artwork have largely overwhelmed the shelves of record stores, rendering any correlation between interesting artwork and fantastic music impossible to prove. Fane, the debut full-length from the UK’s Ante-Inferno, is an exception to the empirical rule. With a darkly mysterious forest shrine pining for adulation, Fane follows through with an impassioned collection of tracks that blends old schools of black metal with innovative injections of doom and melodic death, and doesn’t relinquish control until it has vengefully answered every misguided prayer.
Oath (1:05-10:47) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FV2HsFgeNI
Fane‘s titular track introduces the album with instrumental brevity: disturbing dungeon synths echo through the wicked woods, blending the throaty growl of an unknown beast with orchestral strings that betray the evil air. The pace of this track is extraordinarily tamed, slowly meandering as a raft would lazily yet inevitably drift towards a bottomless waterfall. Reaching the crest of the unavoidable cascade, standout track “Oath” delivers an instantly familiar feeling of black metal nostalgia with a torrential opening passage of slow-grooving licks and classic double-kicks. Desperate, angry shrieks from lead vocalist, K. Beanland, cast a depressive shadow on the previously comforting black metal melody and the track skids to a sudden halt. A doom-laden sludgy riff blunders through the static, and Beanland’s aggressive growls fill the atmosphere with sulfur, slowly suffocating anything left alive. Melodic guitars unleash piercing blackened lightning, nodding to Sweden’s famous Gothenburg scene, before easing back into tremelo-picked minor keys woven perfectly into the crushing shroud of death. Ante-Inferno absolutely slays in these slower sections.
Pace is a constant variable throughout Fane. Most tracks lead with impossibly fast blast-beating and brisk, tight riffs that slingshot songs into overdrive. The third track, “Passing,” retains this scorching speed almost throughout, whereas others, such as “Return” and “Worship,” force-feed chunky thunder into deliberately starved passages. Ante-Inferno is not on cruise control: they swerve around obstacles, slam the brakes for potholes, and race for pinks all along the trip. Effortlessly jumping between energetic blankets of sound and standard black metal pacing (still almost breakneck,) every subtly slowed section is calculated and delicious. By making the many-faceted cards of pace appear and disappear with the agile touch of a magician, Ante-Inferno performs their tricks in every act, ultimately pulling thickened blasphemy straight from the dead rabbit’s hat.
These deft variations mid-song extend beyond pace; vocal styles seamlessly transition from a piercing, raw shriek to sickened, cavernous growls. This vocal diversity, in combination with the aforementioned unpredictable speeds, creates an aural platinum mine of unique passages that keep the headbanger returning for more. Closing track, “Fragments,” broods with guitar work submissive to minor chords, showcasing the dominatrix-like layering of sound consistent with the rest of Fane. Masterful shrieks are back, with hypoxiated drum tracks prolonging their breath and intensity. As with the previous tracks, “Fragments” crashes to a halt, reintroducing the sound of inter-planetary collisions as harbingers of impending doom. These sections rival the most agonizing funeral doom in their bleakness, before returning to intergalactic lightspeed.
Ante-Inferno‘s Fane extrudes a depressive, desolate atmosphere through innovative structuring of pace and vocal variance. By combing the northern wilderness for riffs and loading them with shrieked, billowing rage, Fane is a bold behemoth on the hunt in an barren landscape of terrified burrowing creatures.
FFO: Darkthrone, Dissection (early and late), Emperor, Mournful Congregation