Label: Ground Media Group
Origin: Liski, Russia
Blackfog tosses dry, lackluster black metal compositions overboard, promoting progressive songwriting and melodic licks to first rank. One Touch Is Enough steers a warship loaded with innovative nuclear riffs while championing the quintessence of the old fleet’s icy vocals.
Spanning more than 20 minutes across 3 songs, including a brief introductory track, One Touch is Enough traverses an entire album’s worth of whitewater rapids in a buckskin canoe. Opening track “Жестокий Вкус Познания (Cruel Taste of Knowledge)” nods to the fleeting acoustic content of early black metal works like Dissection’s The Somberlain. Meandering acoustic notes waft a breeze of melody across the listener’s ears before a rippling of clean electric inflections signals entrance into the murky depths that the forefathers often portaged.
In heavy contrast, second track “Обетованное забвение (The Promised Oblivion)” charges down the chute with boiling riffs and terrifying shrieks. Lead vocalist Coyote sets anchor with iron-rich snarls, too late to avoid drowning in the track’s magnetic distortion. Above, blackened leads blaze in the northern sky on the tails of devastatingly slow power chords, executed with the finality of Davy Jones’ spade hitting the riverbed.
River That Leads To Nowhere (11:00 - 21:24) Blackfog - One Touch Is Enough (Full EP Premiere) - YouTube
Standout track “River That Leads To Nowhere” sources blackened sands and tumultuous waters from the cascading riffs of its Scandanavian progenitors. Terse instrumental verses float over inverted slabs of bedrock before the track channelizes its stream of consciousness. Tightly coiled guitar solos avulse from the primary current, electrifying flowlines otherwise bogged down in slack water. Echoing notes wander through the tune before a crushing deluge of power chords tsunamis through the floodplain. Lead axeman Unlight steers masterfully throughout the epic track, breaking the levee of melodic monotony, and bursting through triumphantly into the ocean of prominence.
One Touch Is Enough is an unrivaled black metal odyssey, sure to wash tidal waves of enlightenment over even the most worm-holed fan of extreme metal. The two-crewed Russian warship Blackfog has commanded a mighty display of force into the open sea, leaving much of modern metal still treading choppy waters.
FFO: Dissection, Shape of Despair, Sargeist, Mgla, Unanimated