Vehemency
At first, before hearing the album, I had my doubts about Furze and its fourth full-length Reaper Subconscious Guide: is this some lame attempt at creating experimental music for the sake of sounding different or what? Luckily my thoughts turned out to be false, but most certainly Reaper Subconscious Guide is an odd bird: groovy, heavily doom metal influenced black (?) metal dedicated to Black Sabbath, recorded analogically and with equipment spanning from 40s to 70s, there’s a lot of eerie Glockenspiel played throughout the record, the weird clean vocals proclaim ’hail Satanas’ silently as in some children’s nighttime spooky story, and... Yeah, you get a general idea of the album’s weird nature.
What’s most brilliant about this oddness is that it all works brilliantly. The very, very detailed, professional and natural production is pure pleasure to my ears. There’s some clumsiness in the playing in all departments, especially in the drums, but it’s only charming. Repetitive, doomy and really heavy riffs are all around the album beginning from the first seconds to the album ending brooding monster ”Essential Wait”. Only infrequently can black metal be spotted from this album: as an example, some tremolo riffage on ”Earlier Than the Third Might of the Cosmos” nods to that direction, at least.
The five songs are all long, spanning from seven to thirteen minutes, and though there’s a lot of repetition - which isn’t a negative thing - these compositions comprise many interesting breakdown passages and little twists. The ass kicking riffage is always in the main role, and it’s enhanced by the other instruments and unique vocal delivery. Reaper Subconscious Guide impressed me strongly and the album is not to leave my player anytime soon. A wholeheartedly recommended piece of ghostly, old doom metal sound.