Black Metal is pre-eminently the genre for one-man bands and projects. I can’t even count how many of those I’ve come across over the years. But it is something that very often seems to work just fine, working out a personal vision and not having to make (musical) compromises will probably contribute to this. This Bogatyr from Moscow is another one-man act of an anonymous musician unleashing this 25-minute digital EP on humanity.
This self-titled EP starts with a kind of ritualistic soundscape that gets fainter as the track progresses and doesn’t prepare you at all for what erupts next. An incredibly vicious sounding kind of under produced noisy Black Metal, a sound that is difficult to disentangle and that you will have difficulties with wrapping your head around. When you have powered through the sound quality, it gets under your skin and Bogatyr turns out to be an extremely interesting experience. A musical comparison is hard to make, due to the devastating production/sound Ildjarn at its harshest comes to mind. But Bogatyr draws influences from more than one angle because in ‘Кровавая сечь’ a clear Heavy Metal influence can be deciphered, or call it Viking/Pagan, if you like – that melody is a real earworm.
Due to the ferocious and impenetrable sound, it is sometimes even difficult to hear which instruments are being used, but that is exactly the charm of it. All in all, this is truly a gem in low-fi Black Metal, Bogatyr takes a much more creative and adventurous approach than most genre contemporaries.
