Capel Beulah / Olkoth
Split

A sonic blood pact between two of the nowadays black metal underground’s most promising hordes, this split album between CAPEL BEULAH and OLKOTH features seven exclusive tracks spread across 44 minutes. CAPEL BEULAH are up first, and strike with four ghoulish tracks that are manic delirium incarnate. Righteously raw yet somehow strangely spacious, blitzed and brittle but overwhelmingly physical, almost to the point of perverse headbanging, the UK quartet’s entry here invokes a diabolically authentic first-wave atmosphere. Names thus invoked include very earliest Mayhem, Hungary’s Tormentor, and Germany’s Poison, but there’s a wonderfully strange balance here between ghostliness and trashiness.