Vehemency Good black metal bands from United Kingdom are few and far between. Basilisk was somewhat a rare exception, albeit I wouldn’t say that their first and last album A Joyless March Through the Cold-Lands was still a masterpiece of any sort.

Vintyr, handling everything on this album, has created a nice 27-minute album of noisy black metal. The album is a violent assault from the beginning to the end. The vocals are quite effected and also the drum machine is a bit awkward, but the best features of A Joyless March reside in the actual compositions. The starting songs, ”Deep in the Dark Where I Lay in Wait” and ”The Force Inside the Opposites” bring in some really nice melodies, the latter almost Middle-Eastern-like, that have been in my head since my initial listen of the album many years ago, near the time when the album came out. Production-wise, the album is clearly bedroomish, but during the years I’ve grown to respect the charming, amateurish approach.

But after the first two songs, A Joyless March kind of loses its vigour. Surely, we are still provided enjoyable belligerent attacking and the last song ”The Awakening of HIM” is a good clean-sound guitar-only outro, but the compositions are nowhere near the brilliance of the first ones. It’s a shame. Put those first songs on to a seven inch or something, and you have a nearly perfect EP. But my rating must affect the album as a whole, and hence I can’t give a better score - unfortunately.