THE BLACK LEAGUE - Ichor
October 18, 2000, 24 years ago
(Nuclear Blast)
I'll gleefully ride the party line on this one, as is designed, for The Black League is the brainchild of ex-Sentenced singer Taneli Jarva, who taps a few mates (two, to varying degrees, from Impaled Nazarene) to create a delicious album that picks up where Amok left off and goes in a more commercial direction, but a different commercial direction than Sentenced would go. Whereas Jarva's ex-bandmates are doing new Metallica ineptly, The Black League is much more creative, more like Dark Tranquillity, or perhaps Kovenant and Samael songs without the electronica, or perhaps catchy golden-era Paradise Lost. Melody is lovingly caressed at arm's length, tugged and shunned in place of bite. And in accordance with the album's splashy graphics and big expectations, the band reach a starry creative plane, writing like a Led Zeppelin In Flames, crashing into your CD player with a way smart variety of styles, gruff, growly, burly, mainstream metal but through underground filters, in base, crass terms, gritty, frosty, groovy Scandinavian metal with mid-death vocals, like mid-years Sentenced but with exotic, confounding diversions into goth, stoner, psychedelia, acoustic, all worked seamlessly into the whole.
