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Hesper Payne - дум-дэт группа родом из Британии. Сочетание очень многообещающее! Хотя, скажу честно, я не просто сомневался в правильности определения жанра этой группы до того, как начал слушать "Unclean Rituals", я ожидал каверзы и во время ознакомления с этим релизом. Как театр начинается с вешалки, так и альбом начинается с обложки. А здешний кавер-арт по своей стилистике прочно ассоциируется у меня с дэт-метал группами а-ля Monstrocity. Тем не менее, степенная музыка в исполнении Hesper Payne так и не позволила себе ни единого скоростного всплеска. Мрачный, с отчетливым сладжевым привкусом, гитарный саунд, ритуальные мотивы ударных, почти блэковый вокал, минимальные вкрапления звуков органа, точечные подключения чистого голоса - происходящее в разной степени напоминает и злобных олдскульщиков Encoffination, и ранние работы Katatonia и My Dying Bride, и "модный" новодел от Salome. Но самая вкуснятина - это здешние гитарные соло. Они вовсе не вносят в музыку ту самую "спасительную соломинку" мелодии, за которую мог бы ухватиться "случайный" слушатель. Напротив, искаженный звук этих неторопливых гитарных партий лишь добавляет инфернальности и без того далекому от светлых чувств и эмоций "Unclean Rituals". Ну а чего еще стоило ожидать от альбома, "украшенного" далеким от канонического, но все же необычайно правдоподобным в своей омерзительности Шаб-Ниггуратом, самым знаменитым гермафродитом Лавкрафтовских мифов, Черным Козлом/Козою Лесов? Кстати, обложка недвусмысленно намекает на именно на второй вариант названия этого существа. Помимо сюжетов из мифов Ктулху, Hesper Payne обращаются и к более традиционным мифологическим сюжетам, неспешно ведя нас по созданному ими безрадостному мирку. В конце пути нас будет ждать самое тяжелое испытание: почти фьюнерал-думовая "Sarkless Kitty's Weeping". Впрочем, если вам не понравилась стартовая композиция "Hesper Payne", то дальнейшее прослушивание и без того становится бессмысленным: "лучше" музыка уже не станет.
Было бы неправдой сказать, что этот альбом шедеврален, эпохален, или хотя бы просто далек от принятых стандартов. "Unclean Rituals" подкупает, скорее, атмосферой, полутонами, оттенками звучания, нежели сногсшибательным материалом. Но и одноразовым релиз никак не назовешь - это одна из тех работ, которые не поселяются в проигрывателе надолго, однако возвращаться туда будут достаточно часто. |
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Secrets of forbidden lore
She bowed to unseen masters
Hesper Payne
Lives forever in the soil
Priestess of the hungry trees
My name is Hesper Payne
Beloved of unknown eons
I dance dance round the ancient stones
Ushering madness into the world
Blind cattle of the weakling false god
Bind me with chains of fire
My burned body dead but dreaming
The curse lives of I shall rise again
Empty Emperor
Let me tell you a story
Of hatred death and despair
From a time of darkness
Screams of the wretched fill the air
Empty Emperor brooding in the darkness
Upon a throne of skulls
Dead eyes see everything
Staring at the suns demise
Winged things of abyssal origin
Scream over ashen wastes
Grubbing in the dirt below
The descendants of betrayal
Old, dead, hands
Reach for your soul
Empty Emperor alone among the shadows
Rules over a cold dead world
Corpse planet, monoliths of deadstone
Stand stark against a pitiless sky
Funeral fire, consuming pyre
Inferno tombs that where once cities
Devastation now in rule
Carnage dances to the Emperors tune
Alone entombed in the frozen planet
Doomed until the end of time
Alone I control this world
The forces of decay
Are mine to command
Entropy my cold and sterile lover
Birthed to me her children
From her barren womb
Empty Emperor carious in grimnity
Surveys his charnel palace
Feeling neither joy nor glory
The embodiment of the void
Ash statues frozen in fear
Stand sentinel on nothing but dust
Empty Emperor finally in solitude
Planet death spins on into darkness
Mirthless Dirge of the Toadstool Druid
Toadstool druid
Creeping through the forest
Pale skin dappled
By the light that sneaks through the trees
What unclean rituals you perform in the dark
Seeping up from below
Children of the soil heed your call
Words that writhe
Like the moss on the rocks
Slither about
The cathedral of leaves
Rights of adumbration
Sepulchre of obscutration
catacombs of disposetion
Golgothic world of cariosity
Call upon
The black goat our mother
Her children swarm
From the sepulchre of green
The druid kneels
Before the abomination
And delivers communion
Into the mouth of madness
The Maiden and the Mariner
I knew that when I saw her
I would make her mine
Take my fill of her pretty flesh
And gift her corpse to the inky brine
Her hair was the colour of the dawn
Her knowing smile divine
Her skin as pale as the hungry moon
And yet her eyes seemed much older than her time
Could I have been anymore arrogant?
To believe myself the greater evil
There are things much older than I could ever dream
That lurk in forgotten places of the world
She led me on a merry chase
Through dark deserted streets
I ran till my lungs where fire
Down towards the sound of the sea
Through crooked alys that seemed to close behind me
Out onto a lonely little beach
I cornered her in quiet secluded culvert
To my surprise she smiled and beckoned me
The bitch was a sea frett, poured into woman flesh
Horrified I spied the seething mass she hid beneath her dress
Her body split throat to navel, a new maw in her chest
She peered at me with ancient eyes and I forsaw my death
Then I knew how it was to be the prey
Her tendrils caught my limbs before I could escape
She slid her teeth into me gentle as a lover
As she dragged me to the sea I knew my life was over
The Derelict Alert
Four days out of Aukland
We picked up survivors of a drifting wreck
A curious breed from the southern seas
They carried an idol of a loathsome god
Deformed and wretched
Peeling skin and distended eyes
Pilgrims searching for a promised land
Hidden beneath the waves
The old ones will rise again
Their shaman uttered through ulcered lips
It was then that the fiends took arms
Stormed the bridge and captured the ship
They set course for a storm
Building upon the eastern horizon
And fell upon the crew
With twisted knives teeth and claws
From the waves
Rise gruesome spires
Siesmic effigy
From primal days
Oh behold
Rising from the sea
A million years of screaming terror insanity and grief
Don't look to christ to save our souls
The sun has died in the leaden skies
For these are the final days
We approached an island
Newly risen from the sea
Upon it stood a collosal city
The kingdom of the beast
Our captors, rejoicing fiends
Dragged us all ashore
In a screaming frenzy
Forced us to open a titanic door
From the bowels of the festering pit
We heard the tyrants call
A slithering horror
A mountain of flesh
From the darkness the nightmare crawled
Stars wheeled strange bells peeled
Madness a thousand ways
As we beheld the lord of R'lyeh
Herald of the end of days
Lord of the Green Abyss
In fear I bow to you
Great and terrible lord
Enthralling alien song
Drifts on the ages
Mucus choked chant to Yoth Kalla
In his deep dark cold his queen awaits
In fear I bow to you
Green and terrible lord
Enthralling alien song
Drifts on the ages
Send forward
Your cloying children
Clamour for
The sweet flesh of man
Swarming up from emerald pressure
Roping arms writhe in the sun
Lord of the green abyss
Rise from eon slumber
Lord of the green abyss
Dwell in the dark no more
Doom from the Cursed North
Two red orbs stare into the night
Purple ichor flowing to the sacrifice
Frozen y'kilith ice tomb from the stars
Waits for the end of time in the lonely northern sea
R'lim Shekieroth the white worm
Devours those who seek his wisdom
Servant of the cold grey flame
Brought his doom to ancient hyperborea
Harbinger of the age of ice
Silent earth now a frozen tomb
Oh when the wind blows you hear him
Howling in the night
Out in the frigid fog
A crystal tomb awaits you
Doom from
The cursed north
Will bring terror
From his white fortress
The ice worm rides again
Doom from
The cursed north
Will bring horror
Nightmare coils writhing
Frozen stinking breath
The air freezes in our lungs
We will never thaw from his icy gaze
Waves frozen in eternal motion
The worm uncoils and wraps the world in stillness
Sarkless Kitty's Weeping
The sky was the colour of dead swans wings
The placid dove roused to violence by the lashing winds
Hills bruised with heather tortured by relentless rain
A lone weeping figure, naked save for shroud of pain
My misery
Will out last the dulcet glow of the sun
Lost in abandonment
The ghost consumed by everything that has failed to be
I told the bitch I loved her
Held her face in hand
Told her I would never leave
Gossamer promises so perfect yet so fragile
Deftly spun soon torn apart by the winds of deciet
Old Aggie saw him riding
Look of purpose on his face
Hard upon the Richmond road
Best get yourself in doors girl
An ill wind chills my bones
And I don't think he's coming home
Having taken his fill of her flesh
My sire fled
Leaving the weeping whore soiled and bereft
Not before his seed had taken route and I came to be
Over come with shame
She fled to the river to abort herself clean
Sarkless she stands in the murky water
Gutting her womb with whatever bloody hands can find
Roses and tears blossom on pale cold skin
Too late she acknowledges
The storm bearing down upon her pretty head
Rain soaked all hope lost she lets her lungs fill with silt and weeds
Here in my cold wet birth grave
I was born and shall haunt
Imprisoned in the swaddling flesh
Of my mothers womb
Forever I haunt this place with my curse
Trapped in the rotting womb of this wretched whore
Forever unborn the pain corrupts both flesh and mind
My hatred contaminates the soil
The bitches weeping will never cease
I will gift her untold horror for the torment she bestowed on me
Unbirth eternal imprisoned in her flesh forced to share the lords disdain
So I invest my pain to tear the earth apart
My rage will blacken the soil and curse the purest heart
And we shall remain as one till sun is long dead and gone
Wandering the blackened earth beneath a starless sky forever more