DARK BUDDHA RISING
The Black Trilogy SVART Tampere’s tripped-out doomlords journey back through time and space
The Black TriloGy, a seven-LP box set from Finland’s hypnotic doom overlords Dark Buddha Rising, actually houses four releases within its luxurious, jet-black sleeves: their first three full-lengths plus their first demo, 2007’s I. Granted, the latter only comes with the vinyl edition, but it’s worth prioritising over CD and digital if you can. Locking into extremely minimal but effective grooves, I is a very promising origin, like a much darker Can getting deep into the innards of Black Sabbath riffs, only breaking for the occasional noise freakout.
Dark Buddha Rising’s first album proper, 2008’s Ritual IX, finds the band’s sound coming into clearer focus, encapsulating Neurosis-ian chug, dense Ufomammut-esque psychedelia and kaleidoscopic krautrock, all filtered through that uniquely Finnish tradition of minimal, trance-inducing metal. It’s that same energy that flows through the likes of Thergothon, Beherit or Oranssi Pazuzu (albeit in different ways): that wild, unsettling darkness that sucks you in like quicksand and claws just at the fringes of your sanity, evoking so much through so little.
Second opus, 2009’s Entheomorphosis, cleans things up a bit too much, however, with a curiously muted production that loses some of the previous LP’s raw allure. Though its heavier sections don’t hit quite as hard, it does bring a host of psychedelic textures to the fore, and Transcent is the closest thing to a 20-minute doom cover of the Doctor Who theme that this universe has generated yet.
2011’s Abyssolute Transfinite has a notably nastier guitar tone from the off, and expands on the group’s hallucinogenic properties in a much more subtle, nuanced manner, unfolding at a patient, glacial pace. The vocals are largely buried in the mix and smothered in layers of Ministry-style distortion and effects, but given how adept the band have become at lulling listeners into deep, dreamlike states by this point, you’ll hardly even notice.
FOR FANS OF: Oranssi Pazuzu, Nibiru,
Ufomammut
KEZ WHELAN