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Another collection of favourite 90’s Black Metal. Highly regarded at the time and still pretty fresh today. Difficult to believe some of these tracks are approaching 30 years of age. This early to mid 90’s Scandinavian Back Metal sound, so prevalent as an influence in hundreds of bands for the last 30 years and taken to another level in production and in a more contemporary song structure by bands such as Fuath or Cantique Lepreux. The year of 1994 was an excellent year for me, the year I got into extreme metal by way of Bathory, Mayhem (through an album by a band called Eminenz, thats a great story for some other time.. ) but also Cannibal Corpse and Brutal Truth.

It was also the year of the infamous ‘Ultra Brutal – Open Air of Penafiel’, a metal festival taking place in a small satellite city some 40 kms east of Porto, under desert like 40 celsius sun, organised  by a guy called Alberto Barros who, legend has it, messed with too many band’s cachet and in this instance dropped Cradle of Filth at the Porto airport with no money for travel and no further  explanation. The bill consisted of Cradle of Filth promoting their debut ‘The Principle of Evil Made Flesh’. They played absolutely flawlessly, in broad day light, under the scorching heat, you could see their corpse paint melting. I am not sure which song they played first but I remember everybody just stopped what they were doing, some jaws dropped, admiring the sheer onslaught of their sound, specially Danny’s presence and Nick Barker… who was shredding at a pace I don’t remember seeing at the time from a young band playing a debut. As a drummer myself I was (and still am) astonished at the drum work in this album. There was also Grave, Gorefest and Hipocrisy in the bill.