Review Summary: Black metal and occultism in psychedelic rock disguise?!
Black Magick SS return from outer space with their new album
Rainbow Nights, and the band sounds better than ever.
It can't be denied that our time is greatly obsessed with the '80s. Just look at the resurrection of fashion trends, the themes you see in movies and series (like
Mandy and
Stranger Things for example)... and of course it is the same case in music as well. During this re-discovery of these old trends, more and more "retro" bands and distros are popping up nowadays, delivering us, in my opinion, great music in overall. Black Magick SS also jumped on this "retro-wave", but also this band is known for the very unique and obscure twist on retro music. The band combines elements from highly different sources, more specifically: black metal's satanic / occult image and vocal style (with hints of gimmicky NSBM) with the various psychedelic rock movements.
Rainbow Nights is mostly driven by the cheesy psychedelia, but mixing black metal into this concept makes this project fresh and very original.
Right after the first few minutes you'll get what is this album all about
:
Rainbow Nights, as the title and the colors on the cover would indicate, offers no more than pure entertainment and a psychedelic musical journey. The opener,
Endless Hallucinations, fairly demonstrates the album's main concept: it strongly relies on the catchy guitar melodies and the cheesy synthetisers - but with very...
odd vocals, which is a mixture of the typical black metal caws and clean choruses. Each song follows more or less the same formula, but surprisingly the album doesn't get boring at all. The secret (black) magic behind the album's success, in my opinion, is how well it recreates the old-school aesthetics, plus the additional modernisation which comes from the project's (black) metal influences. Productionwise speaking, the album sounds 100% like an album straight from the '80s: the riffs, the solos, the synth work, the drum sounds... all of these stand as a proof of a very-very careful work in recreating that certain retro atmosphere. Personally I enjoyed the great guitarwork and the synths the most, but after a while... the clean choruses get pretty annoying sometimes, dampening the album's tastiness a little bit. Whoever is behind this project is a pretty fun guy and a pretty good songwriter, but let's face it: not a great singer at all. However, since the clean choruses is the only bad component in
Rainbow Nights, this album is a rather enjoyable release! Furthermore, due to the great improvement in the production quality, I dare to say it is the best Black Magick SS album, and generally speaking: this is pretty fun.
I don't want to reveal all the "tricks" this record contains... Just go, check this out! This is not long, the runtime is barely over 30 mintues. And if you're not a
trve kvlt dork, chances are you'll like what you hear.
