Unsacred – False Light

Ahhh, great start to the week right here.  Or should that be written as raight heaaaaah booooiii?  We like black metal, love it in fact.  The more devastating, the better, the less cliche the better, the more post upon post with dashes (like this: post-) the better.  Corpse paint be damned, sick of it, let the music speak for itself.  Image is dumb, give us something here.  Thankfully, there are some bands that “get it” and they’re “getting it” more and more.  Unsacred are one of several interesting acts to have come from Richmond VA in the past decade, up there, in our opinion, with Iron Reagan and Occultist.  In fact when we first revamped the site we reviewed the latter.  But in such a place as Richmond, seething with potholes that come out of nowhere after you pass an affluent suburb that pops up like a cold sore, it requires more black metal.  Let Unsacred be the path upon which others will tread, the emperors.  With three EPs under their belts since 2011, including the awesome Three Sisters, it was time they spewed out a proper full-length, and here it is, released only a few months ago.  We’re finally getting caught up with months of backlog and moving into this thing called the present, for once, but we still have a few dips into the past so let us be baptised in False Light.

  

Stare at that cover for awhile, just do it.  Let the lines blur, let the gray sink into the spaces between, let your eyes create hallucinations before you, minus the drugs.  Way deep in that mess of lines, in the middle, is the void into which the music shall toss your flesh.  False Light just, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu, it tears, it really does.  Let’s get the basics out of the way before we drool and sound like fanboy fools without any capability in typing in any language, let alone English.  Unsacred are rather religious in their approach to black metal, which for anyone less would be a disaster.  Drums with the pulse of winter, chords emitting fumes of a funeral pyre, and ah yes, classic shrieks of the dead.  Really, at first glance, it’s something like a basic, average girl ticking off the “eh, I don’t know…” meter, but then you get to know her better, and man that personality…

 

See Unsacred have superior command of the classique, they do it better than most, they’re at the frontline of the best in spite of the commonalities.  False Light is complete command of the essence of black metal, yet with just the right skewing from the post- movement to modernize it as it should be.  At times this occurs simply through a repetitive approach, which most fledgling bands would use simply as a crutch, but for Unsacred it’s not, no, it’s their entire essence.  Dig that wavering, slicing riff in the title track starting it all off, it sways left, it sways right, your organs fall out.  Completely encapsulating would be the phrase to use.  The thing is this entire release is filled with such moments, because Unsacred understands when to catch a groove and exactly how long to hold it, how to build upon it, how to develop it.  It’s not simply hit and run for them, it’s hit and keep on hitting, keep on bruising until that bruise bleeds, and then a little more so you never forget it.  Spectacular, give us more.

 

Unsacred Official Facebook

Written by Stanley Stepanic

Unsacred – False Light
Forcefield Records
4.7 / 5