Gorrch - Nera Estasi

GORRCH - Nera Estasi (SCHATTENKULT Produktionen CD 2016)

Never judge the book by its cover, they say. You also should remember this, when you’ll see this fuckin bad artwork for this CD. Even the band name doesn’t sound that good. All these doubts will be quickly erased when you’ll hear some of the best black metal that was ever composed and recorded in Italia. Hmm, OK, I know that this country is not fuckin Norway or Sweden, and they never had too many bands to be proud of. But some I can surely mention here! Along Mortuary Drape you will have to check Spite Extreme Wings (with killer “Vltra”), Janvs (“Fvlgvres”) or Ars Macabra (“III”). And Gorrch is also real precious stuff, in my opinion.

“Nera Estasi”, which is Gorrch’s debut album, doesn’t leave my CD player since almost a week now. I’m really impressed and will use this opportunity to recommend it to you all now, because Gorrch deserves attention! Stylistically their music sounds to me like a perfect combination of old and new. I can hear many traditional black metal riffs and ways of arrangements / ideas. But along them the whole music has more modern sounding song structures, production and the atmosphere is similar to many newer black metal bands. More so, Gorrch has a slightly progressive touch here and there. And in the end it’s the diversity of “Nera Estasi” what I can say is the greatest strength of this album. Within each song you can hear many different ways of playing and emotions. The music can go from blasting black metal through atmospheric stuff up to something very harmonious and with trance like feeling. I like how it all smoothly changes, but doesn’t sound too odd or out of place. Everything here sounds solid and the song structures, ideas for arrangements, compositions, all the riffs are damn superb. Take the final song for example. For me it’s an instant boner, really. It’s fantastic instrumental song, which has so many great riffs and passages that the impression is simply enormous. And it starts relatively quietly, but gets more aggressive and faster before the song is finished. Or you can listen to “Atra Bile”, which is probably the most melodic and slowest song from the whole album (but even here there are some fast parts, of corpse!!), reminding me Gehenna a bit, maybe because the vocalist sound a lot like Sanrabb haha! But the result is again just fantastic. And when later “Crudo primordio” blasts off with some killer riffs and great mixture of bit more clean sounding vocals and harsh scream, the result if simply perfect – yet again! A lot of the riffs in this song are very traditional and you would be able to compare them to classic Scandinavian black metal, but again… I feel like Gorrch is way more than just that.

Due to this diversity, the music is sometimes quite difficult to be described or categorized, I couldn’t compare it to one or two other bands. But I suppose this should not even matter or be a problem. The quality is there, the whole “Nera Estasi” is simply excellent and well… If you never heard of Gorrch before, check this band out asap.

Standout tracks: “Crudo primordio”, “Nera Estasi”

Final rate: 90/100