Capel Beulah / Olkoth - Split Digipak-CD

A sonic blood pact between two of the nowadays black metal underground’s most promising hordes, this split album between CAPEL BEULAH and OLKOTH features seven exclusive tracks spread across 44 minutes. CAPEL BEULAH are up first, and strike with four ghoulish tracks that are manic delirium incarnate. Righteously raw yet somehow strangely spacious, blitzed and brittle but overwhelmingly physical, almost to the point of perverse headbanging, the UK quartet’s entry here invokes a diabolically authentic first-wave atmosphere. Names thus invoked include very earliest Mayhem, Hungary’s Tormentor, and Germany’s Poison, but there’s a wonderfully strange balance here between ghostliness and trashiness. 

While it’s been three years since SIGNAL REX released OLKOTH’s first two demos on vinyl format as The Immortal Depths & Treasures of Necromancy, it does not mean the band have been idle. In fact, to coincide with the release of this split album, OLKOTH are releasing the Promo 2022 tape simultaneously, with both these recordings in anticipation of the band’s long-awaited debut album. And indeed, if their three tracks here are any indication, OLKOTH’s resultant debut full-length should be malevolent and majestic indeed. On this split, the band offer two “new versions” of songs they’ve previously never revealed publicly, alongside another all-new track. By any designation they go by, OLKOTH’s songwriting continues to betray a depth of imagination even when pushed through such a stratifyingly raw soundfield; the riffs here are smeared and weird, with a dusting of spectral synths to push their entry further into the realm of otherworldly.