Info
- Band(s): Ainzamkait
- Label(s): Purity Through Fire
- Release Format(s): Cassette, CD
- Release Year: 2024
- Review Date: May 6, 2025
- Author(s): Seth Nekromancer
Ok! When I see the cover art of an album, and it’s a picture of a guy with corpse paint, a Burzum t-shirt, wristbands, nails, bullet belt, and a threatening position, I make an assumption about the Black Metal that must thunder. It’s something I do frequently, and in the case of Ainzamkait, I’ve obviously done it again. The opus ‘Was des Lebens nicht wert’, which translated from German means ‘What is not worth living’ or something like that, takes advantage of all the resources of minimalism and traditional sounds of old Black Metal. You’ll see why I say it; the introduction of the keyboards is a slow tune that injects a black melancholy for forgotten eras, buried in the dust of time. The tune that is projected now will be present in a recurring way in some passages of the album.
The following track is the one that gives the work its name and is a mid-tempo instrumental where the guitar tremolos advance proudly over a mid-tempo rhythm. This instrumental leaves me with a feeling of some ancient chant of a march to war. In ‘Heidentum’, the vocals finally appear. Just like in the previous track, the mid-tempo and the tremolo guitars guide the march. The riffs are loaded with cold emotions, like those that their old compatriots Nargaroth have vomited to the world in the past. In ‘Feindesleid’, the influences of the t-shirt that Grymnir shows in the cover art become audible. This song, in particular, is easy to digest for those who consume nineties Black Metal, especially with influences from the Norwegians, following that minimalist resource of speaking above with more presence of the voices without being strident, only spitting out contempt and hatred. The blows are given where they have to be given. There are not many ornaments in the drums, and as they have already become an indelible mark of the work, the guitars are the ones that point the way until they disappear in the fade out. This is one of those songs that tries to embed itself in the saturated memory, and in my case, it has already done so.
In the last two tracks of the album, the patterns and formulas used don’t change, but I don’t consider it to have fallen into the abyss of monotony (although one might think so), since each song has its own dark spirit that gives it a character and image different from the other tracks. In ‘Im Tal des Schicksals’, several varied but well-connected riffs are enthroned with that crowd of cold emotions that, along with the ghostly appearance of the first clean vocals of the work in the last minutes of the track, light the black bonfire for ancient nostalgia. This work appeals to that old nostalgia for the darkest and most powerful times of Black Metal that many of us lived through when the northern sky was lit and warriors marched proudly, decapitating crosses and defiling the ether with ashes! Another good release from the Purity Through Fire label, which, as I discovered, was released on December 25th, a special date for murder!
Ainzamkait
- Country: Germany
- Style: Black Metal
- Links: Facebook, Instagram, Bandcamp
