France's Glorior Belli is a black metal band with a dark doomy atmosphere. After one demo and their debut full length, they got signed to the prestigious Southern Lord Recordings to release their second album; Manifesting The Raging Beast. And that is exactly what they do with this album…

 

As some of you may know, Southern Lord is a record label that mainly releases doom metal, as the owner of the label is one of the two members in Sunn 0))) and many other great doom and drone acts. Therefore Glorior Belli cannot just be a typical black metal band. The thing I have noticed many times within black metal is the dreamy atmosphere in the guitar sound, that seems to make songs sound very long-stretched and very epic (note that this is usually only the case with well produced black metal).

 

Glorior Belli also possesses this guitar sound, and with the first track of this album ‘From Darkness' they display a very dark doom metal sound. Within the next songs the tempo is picked up to even the speed of blast beats, but the ‘dreamy' atmosphere is never broken because of this. Add some typical evil tortured screams to this music and you've got yourself some decent, well-produced black metal.

 

For me this record is another step towards me actually liking black metal and that is the ultimate accomplishment for a black metal band to me. Glorior Belli really managed to impress me and I hope to hear more from them in the future.