Karcavul "Intersaone"

    Hailing from the unforgiving darkness somewhere in Lyon, France, Karcavul digs deep into the sludgy nightmarish depths of society and unearths a tomb of relentless extreme music. While listening to this three song release called, "Intersaone," I found myself lost in the music and overcome by this frozen feeling of terror and enjoyment. 

     Karcavul is not an easy group to categorize, which I think plays to their advantage when making music. I hear sludge metal along with some old school death metal and even black metal elements. The band’s tone and presentation at times reminded me of Noothgrush and Eyehategod where the music could serve as the theme song for the fall of humanity. Still, compared to the two groups I just mentioned, Karcavul is very diverse sounding on this release. 

     No matter how you want to describe them, the atmosphere created by the band when recording these three songs fringes on the edge of human sanity. The opening track, “Mangepierres,” is quite bizarre with these inhuman noises in the background and then some guy comes in speaking calmly in French. Once the audio clips fade out the band starts pounding away at a blackened riff that eventually slows down for a thick sludgy part. As the drums feverishly smash at the cymbals the guitar creates a haunting landscape. The vocals really capture the song’s tone by crying out in agony over the harsh noise. 

    The band displays some dynamic songwriting skills and the second track, “Illuminashichs,” definitely starts out more sludgy and creates this fear in the back of the mind as if something wicked is coming towards you in slow motion. The band sort of returns to the more quickened paced black and death metal approach, but towards the end fades out with a doom like riff section. How do you make this type of music more distributing? Add the sounds of children screaming in complete terror as the guitar pounds away creating powerful waves of distortion. I think the final song, “Crackleurres,” perfectly closed the books on this horrific musical journey. Once again the band tears through heavy sounding riffs that range from sludge to death and builds a gruesome atmosphere. 

    In the end, Karcavul is following in the footsteps of all those other extreme bands who write music that crosses over into the bleak and sinister side of the human mind. Their musicianship was rather solid and I think my only complaint is that the vocals could have been recorded louder at times. Other than that, this is an album that I strongly recommend for fans of extreme and haunting music. Actually, I want to see Karcavul’s music played at a high school dance...the looks of fear on those students’ faces would be priceless...

Karcavul "Illuminashichs" :