### Furze: Reaper subconcious guide

#### 30/12/10 || Love Lagerkvist

I was tasked to review Furze partly because I found the name kind of interesting, but mostly ‘cuz no one else wanted them (or should I say wanted him, as it’s a one man effort). A quick visit down in the archivous metallum showed me why: The guy looks like this and plays something Last.fm likes to tag “experimental black metal”. Now I don’t hold anything against this kind of music (in fact, I love it when it’s done right), but these days it has started to morph from less of actual experimentation until it became yet-another-overplayed-metal-trend. Or maybe that’s just me. Not that it matters anyway, as I got big fucken surprise once I turned “Reaper subconscious guide” on.

One second into opener “Earlier Than the Third Might of the Cosmos” we get treated by – hold on tight – an early Black Sabbath-riff along with some slow cymbal-heavy drumming in a sandpaper dry production (that’s a good thing, even if some people might get irritated by the really high cymbals). Now, for all intents and purposes this could just be an odd little way to start of a furious black metal hatefest, but as fast as the Ozzy-like vocals come in you realize that the Furze-dude wanted a new Sabbath album so much that he took things in his own hands. And you know what, Furze-dude kind of succeeded.

What we have here is obviously not anything as good as the early-Sabbath records that has influenced him, but that’s nothing secret. In fact, Furze-dude knows this to the extent that he even embraced it. To work around this, he decided to throw in some tricks of his own. First of all the songs here are a bit longer (ranging from 6 to 12 minutes in length) and overall more doomy than a lot of the source materials, instrumentation overall fells a bit more minimalistic and vocals are a bit lower than Ozzymandias dito. In addition to this, there are also some wacky xylophone and black metal-shrieking parts recurring all through the albums five tracks. Add up all of these factors and you should end up with the respectable number 7,5.

- Information
- Released: 2010
- Label: Agonia Records
- Website: www.furze.no
- Band
- Woe J. Reaper: everything and their mother

- Tracklist
- 01. Earlier than the third might of the cosmos
- 02. It leads
- 03. Immortal lecture
- 04. The bonedrum
- 05. Essential wait