Witchcraft (Obtained Enslavement album) Witchcraft is a studio album by Obtained Enslavement, released in 1997. Witchcraft; Studio album. Obtained Enslavement. * Licensed by Holocaust Records (Riccardo Figiaconi, Genova, Italy). * First edition & repress (unknown release date) only differ in Maxtrix (see below).

The Taste Swap hits bullseye for a change So a few months ago, I hit up some of my more talented fellow reviewers whose work I respected despite having very little taste in common with, and undertook a Taste Swap Challenge. Well today is round three, wherein I swap with yet another Canadian, this time the cascadian 'holy shit maaaaan this is so transcendental' genius in RapeTheDead. Vbag keygen.sis. True story, he was the first guy to track down my personal Facebook page and send me fanmail that way, so even if he was a shitty writer (which he isn't), I'd love him anyway. Anywho, just like with the last one, I didn't quite get what I was expecting when I proposed the swap challenge.

I mean, he certainly provided me with black metal, no doubt, but I was expecting something along the lines of Gris or Agalloch, but instead what he gave me was more along the lines of Emperor. And even better, it's apparently an extremely well regarded album within the black metal scene. And even better than that, all the heaps of praise that get piled on top of the album are 100% deserved. That's right, out of the fjordiest fjords of northern fjordland, we have Obtained Enslavement, and despite being much less of a black metal guy than certain other genres, I feel pretty confident in calling their second album, Witchcraft, one of the finest symphonic black metal albums in existence. Obviously I'm a fan of symphonic metal in general anyway, I've been defending Rhapsody of Fire for years, but this is one of the very, very few albums to incorporate the classical influence so bloody masterfully. At no point do the strings, keys, horns, or that goddamn awesome timpani feel tacked on as an afterthought, and at the same time, the same can be said about the traditional metal instrumentation. It can be difficult to tell which aspect of the overall sound is leading the other at times, which is brilliant because it shouldn't really be one or the other anyway, and Obtained Enslavement not only realized that, but managed to execute it very well.

Take the metal portion of the record, for instance. In a sense I suppose you could call it 'typical', since the vast majority of the guitar work is comprised of tremolo patterns and the drums seem to blast along for a good amount of the running time, but the inherent melody in these riffs are just overwhelming.

I can't even point out specific examples because every single track manages to nail this flawlessly. That's actually one of the most prevalent aspects about Witchcraft, the melody. It's pretty much overwhelming in its complexity and saturation, but it never crosses into the territory of being sugary and harmless. This album manages to beef up classical passages with aggressive morbidity whilst simultaneously giving raw and hateful black metal a sense of beauty and fullness. The two halves of the pie complement each other in a way that has yet to be replicated in the realm of metal as a whole, and truly must be heard to be believed. I mean, I like Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk just as much as the next guy, but this here is just in a class of its own. Basically, if you take the elements that make up that mid era of Emperor and just make them.