Serpent Lord |The Once Forgotten Ways Of Old |Eisenwald

Serpent Lord is the long buried black metal band of Jake Superchi, the man behind Uada and Ceremonial Castings. The band was born more than twenty years ago and put out a handful of demos, including "The Order Of The Snake". Then it went dark for most of two decades while Superchi's other bands took over his life. The riffs survived the silence. "The Once Forgotten Ways Of Old" finally turns those shelved ideas into a debut album, with members of Uada and Ceremonial Castings in the line up.

"The Once Forgotten Ways Of Old" is six tracks of mid nineties pagan black metal, just under forty minutes long. Superchi recorded and mixed it, Arthur Rizk mastered it, and it comes in a Kris Verwimp cover that could have hung in a record shop in 1995. The sound is raw at the edges and deep in the low end. The guitars are cold and trebly, the drums have real air around them, and the master lets the whole thing roar without sanding the edges off. "Aries Ram" opens with eight and a half minutes of galloping tremolo melody and heathen pride.

"Constrictor" answers with three minutes of pure blasting aggression, and "Forever On The Grounds Of Battle" closes on battlefield grandeur that climbs and climbs. Superchi's shrieks are feral and high, and the drumming swings from full blasts to a mid paced pagan stomp with ease. The melodic leads have Superchi's fingerprints all over them. Anyone who knows Uada will hear those twin guitar lines coming a mile off. The three long tracks at the start, middle and end anchor the album, and the shorter ones fill the gaps with speed. It's a buried debut dug up twenty years late, raw, melodic and proud of every pagan cliché it wears.

|8.0