siLLy puPPy It seems like there is no end of one-man black metal bands out there so here’s yet one more coming from the northern Baltic Sea city of Stralsund, Germany. ALBTRAUM, German for “nightmare” is the one-man project of Chival who plays guitars, drums and bass as well as providing the vocals that lament about all that is evil and morbid. Formed in 2012, ALBTRAUM has so far only released this sole EP’s worth of material titled MISANTHROPIC ANTICHRIST which is technically a demo but was independently released on the Goatlord Records. Honestly the quality is good enough here to qualify as a bonafide release.

Chival delivers a well studied journey of the black metal universe in this short run of six tracks that only reaches the 24 minute playing time. Influences include early black metal pioneers such as Bathory, Morbid, Mayhem, Sodom, Kreator, Marduk and Endstille but the way this music is presented also brings some of the more progressively jagged playing styles of more recent Dødheimsgard to mind. Chival seems like a natural for this style of music and delivers interesting off-kilter guitar riffing and irregular songwriting styles complete with bleak atmosphere and sound effects.

The EP starts off with the three minute intro “Six Bells of Doom” which begins with a howling wind and some hellish beastly groans that also finds some scary industrial percussive sounds slowly creeping in as if you have somehow been transported to the depths of hell and are experiencing some prison cell. Church bells chime in the distance and it’s immediately apparent that this dude really knows how to capture the essence of disturbing emotional reactions through sounds and the actual music hasn’t even started yet.

With “Unholy Cross” the black metal begins with gurgling guitar slides and a vocal style that is out of the Dødheimsgard playbook with half sung / half recited lyrical deliveries punctuated by occasional screams and shouts. The guitars engulf the vocals with jagged buzzsaw distorted walls of sound while drum swells both provide a percussive scaffolding as well as irregular outbursts. Like orthodox kvlt black metal, the bass is somewhat mixed into the overall distorted rumble. Tempos fluctuate by speeding up and then slowing down and then speeding up again. It’s all very turbulent and rather difficult to grasp. Occasionally guitar solos buzz in like a colony of angry hornets.

This release is much better than the average black metal novice out there as it truly captures the zeitgeist of the 90s second wave scene but yet adds the sophisticated nuances of excellent production and mixing practices. This dude shows promise of releasing a true black metal classic but six years after this demo and nothing unless he has under different names but judging by how much love he put into his professional website (albtraum-metal.net) it’s a head scratcher why nothing else has emerged. This is excellent black metal and surprisingly good for a mere demo release.