Blood of the Black Owl - A Banishing Ritual

February 19, 2010

Reviewer: Matt

This is some serious rabbit-hole music.  A Banishing Ritual opens with an “In the Beginning…” empty-space drone ebbing and flowing just within the outer limits of perception.  Over the next twelve minutes a chorus of voices emerges slowly, crying out of the din.  First an orgy of clattering bells lays down pseudo-rhythm, then the tom-tom rain dance calls, shakers and sifting sand respond.  All the while the drone grows subtly louder, that demon always nagging in your ear, until the first movement ends with a flute triumphantly holding the fort.  That’s the first twelve minutes.

The next movement seems out of place.  Blood of the Black Owl invokes the Neurosis-inspiration of the first two albums, and until the ritual resumes we’re left clambering to get back in the boat, adrift on a diversion that will satisfy the scene police that this is metal but will not satisfy the discerning acolyte looking for continuation from the brilliant and captivating overture.  Mountainous riffs, indecipherable ranting of the demon-found-a-voice, all crammed into three minutes of distraction in the otherwise seamless flow.

They doesn’t make an easy task for the neurotic classifiers.  I guess this is Native-American-folk-ambient-black-doom.  It’s a tough task for the reviewer when there are no comparisons and no interpretative entryways.  At one time this was considered too close to the band’s heart to release to the public, and it shows.  Frustratingly impenetrable most of its forty one minutes, this music doesn’t offer you a helping hand with familiar European composition.  Maybe A Banishing Ritual calls for don Juan Matus to be looking over your shoulder.  You might need a brujo in this realm of anti-linearity.  Feel free to dissociate your spirit and take your ears with you. 

The resolution is ambiguous.  Is the demon banished?  As the ritual comes to a close there appear more conventional structures to reassociate you with the “real” world, but with the wailing rasps in the background there’s no indication that this house is clear.  Still haunted? Perhaps.  A Banishing Ritual is ouroboric, what it invokes has no beginning or end.  This isn’t a journey because it transcends time and space.

Blood of the Black Owl offers not a quick and easy exorcism but an arrow in your quiver with which to arm your soul.  Thank Bindrune Recordings for not tying down their evidently boundless creativity by posing them in headdresses and smoking peace pipes.  Too many listeners crave obviousness because they don’t want a challenge, but give this a chance despite the learning curve.  Try different sets-and-settings.  Can’t offer assurances here that anyone will like it, as not having walked in the artists’ moccasins for a lifetime tends frustrate knowing A Banishing Ritual, but it’s a worthy purchase celebrating the perseverance of will.   

Release Date: March 1st, 2010
Label: Bindrune Recordings

TRACK LISTING

1.  A Banishing Ritual (Into White)

Total playing time:  41:21

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