Negative Plane - Stained Glass Revelations
Ajna Offensive
Black Metal
10 songs (01:01:27)
Release year: 2011
The Ajna Offensive
Reviewed by Charles
Another week, another exciting American black metal album! Oh, except don’t refer to Negative Plane by any four-letter acronyms to that effect. Drummer Bestial Devotion once said that when he saw his band described as ‘USBM’ ‘(he) threw up a little in (his) mouth’. Too cool for school!

Well, whatever. Elitist whogivesashittery aside, Negative Plane have released a really strong album that, I tentatively predict, will sit alongside fellow Yanks Lake of Blood as of the better black metal records of the year. Certainly one of the most distinctive, anyway: Stained Glass Revelations is simultaneously sinister and psychedelic, fusing their ultra-black Satanic aesthetics with all sorts of ghostly horrors. By the latter, I don’t just mean ‘there’s a sort of creepy intro!’ For sure, Stained Glass Revelations is generously laden with short (1-2 minute) interludes of thundering ‘Phantom at the Opera’ piano theatrics and church organ parping. It’s a testament to the album’s vibe (yes, I used the word ‘vibe’ to describe black metal) that these sound less like pantomime accessories and more like loving additions to a florid gothic horror atmosphere. Like all the extra adjectives in Lovecraft’s prose.

No, what I really mean by ‘ghostly horrors’ can only be encapsulated in a more precise description of a very tricky sound. Negative Plane deliver black metal of the upmost savagery. Their influences are old-school (early Bathory springs to mind), exuding raucous thrash vitriol rather than chilly Norsk blasting. The bass playing is activist, leaping about the place energetically, giving the riffing an exuberant sense of instability. But the main thing is that every track and almost every idea is based around these tremulous, jangling lead guitar lines. They aren’t ‘melodic’, as such. They are these abstract blurtings of reverberating fret-widdling; wailing apparitions around which the rest of the band’s sound has to coalesce like nightmare silhouettes emerging from dry ice.

Aside from the aforementioned interludes, of which there are several, songs are long (between seven and twelve minutes). The eleven-minute closer (and title track) is roughly representative. It opens with a down-tempo doom trudge; crashing backbeat and banshee-cry lead lines in place. But as the vocals enter (the most typical thing about the record- a standard issue blackened growl) the whole thing just becomes… squelchier. Weird, sometimes even major-key tonalities start seeping through this lumbering mass of flatulent percussive flesh and painfully stretched lead guitar tendons. It’s like a quivering black metal blancmange, which gets riotously splashed about the room when the band snaps into sudden up-tempo lucidity. A fast, snorting rhino-riff careers through the middle of this mulch, again gleefully guided by a zigzagging lead guitar warble. Particularly in the slower passages, Stained Glass Revelations feels like the whole thing is only barely held together with quaking buttresses, the different elements seeking to splurge apart into freeform noise at any moment. But these elements click together into a glorious climax comes nine minutes into this last tune, when a superb, pitch-bending monster of a lead pattern swaggers through the mist like a gentleman Satan from a Faust adaptation. It’s like the closing riff from Hey Joe has grown a classic villain-moustache and is stalking the night-time streets of Victorian London in search of damsels to tie to railtracks.

The tough question for the album is whether it quite justifies an hour’s running time. Well, maybe, though more concision would probably not hurt it. But there is something rather apt about the fact that such an esoteric act should, at times, go on a little bit, like a ghost story told in indulgent detail. And whilst some drag (Angels Veiled of Bone), others are perfectly-worked sculptures assembled from grandiose horror-doom and energetic thrash metal immediacy (Lamentations and Ashes). This is a great album, and a worthy successor to 2006’s cult-tastic Et In Saecula Saeculorum.

Killing Songs :
Lamentations and Ashes, All Souls, Stained Glass Revelations
Charles quoted 90 / 100
Other albums by Negative Plane that we have reviewed:
Negative Plane - The Pact... reviewed by Goat and quoted 90 / 100
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