Rating: 9.5

Country: Switzerland

Genre: Ambient/Black Metal

Record Label: Avantgarde Music

Release Date: 2008

Track list:
1. Dark 3.11
2. Dark 3.12
3. Dark 3.13
4. Dark 3.14
5. Dark 3.15
6. Dark 3.16
7. Dark 3.17

Total playing time 01:19:14

Band Website: Darkspace

Darkspace - III

Upon inserting III into your cd-player you are greeted by warm yet eerie synth-waves, creating a sensation of drifting in the primordial emptiness and calm in the nano-second before the birth of the cosmos. And then, amidst a torrent of blast-beats, raging guitars and fat chugging bass and rhythm-guitar the hostility of creation, the harsh extremities of reality, explode into being. Like the universe is an ever changing and unstable fusion of discordant elements, so too is Darkspace's third opus a triumphant melding of various extreme metal and dark ambient styles into a shifting multi-headed beast of a record.

Being at its base a middle-ground between the Swiss trio's riff-oriented first album and the spacey, ambient-laden second one, Darkspace III presents the universe in a devastating wall of sound that is simultaneously vast and claustrophobic. Spiralling stellar streams of tremolo meet crushing event horizon rhythm-guitar crunch and sweeping all-encompassing nebulae of synths and lead guitars as worlds are born and stars collapse in a cold universe expanding mindlessly in the aftermath of its fiery birth.

Drawing obvious inspiration from Thorns and Mysticum, Darkspace isn't afraid to descend into the nihilism of Morbid Angel and Nocturnus inspired death metal riffing as well, or the inhuman vistas created by Lustmordian dark ambience. As eclectic as the subject may be, Darkspace stays firmly grounded in pure extreme metal guitar riffing, punctuating the sweeping sound canvas with some amazing hooks and melodies. With most every track surpassing the ten-minute mark, Darkspace keep things continuously engaging with its evolving riffs and vast palette of black metal styles. Every song on offer serves up something different, from the non-stop blasting explosion of the opener "3.11", to the intricate lead guitar picking and deconstructive chugging of "3.13", the slow build-up of the sinister mid-paced monster that is "3.14", and the gloriously epic second half of "3.16" and "3.17", Darkspace shows its subject matter in all its various facets. With Darkspace, space is dark, but most certainly not empty. And it is Goddamned Heavy, like getting sucked into a black hole (yes, Darkspace's material makes these metaphors particularly easy to apply, which just further shows how well their concept fits their execution). This isn't some anaemic black metal band with wispy, barely audible tremolo and overbearing wussy synths, Darkspace smothers you with ten megaton riffage of the heaviest order.

Not just in the playing itself, but also in the way the sound is mixed and produced do Darkspace show a mastery of their concept. The heavily distorted vocals are a background presence, suggesting distant sentience that is alien and malevolent, while the drum computer is mixed even lower to give a constant backdrop while remaining at a far remote to give the music a free-floating feel, which the gutturally heavy bass and rhythm-section sit on top of to simulate the uncaring, hostile laws of the universe, a world of extremes where every life-giving element is simultaneously harsh and deadly. Existing somewhere apart and above this is the occasional baleful gaze of the synthesizer and the inventive yet somehow doomed sounding lead-guitar parts, like sentience striving to survive amidst the horrors of the cosmos.

Darkspace III somehow manages to top its already superlative predecessors I and II and is both a triumph in song writing and free-flowing conceptual narrative. Not needing pseudo-intellectual drivel extraneous to the music to carry a theme, Darkspace lets the music speak for itself, presenting their oh so simple sounding, two-word theme “dark space”, in such an all-encompassing light with sound alone. Darkspace belongs to a small handful of bands like Negura Bunget and Dark Tribe which I would consider the next real evolution of the black metal sound. A true melding of music and narrative, an evolution already set in motion by the early greats like Burzum and Darkthrone and carried closer to its full expression here.

October 12th, 2008