ELDAR

"Sapere Aude"

Cold Meat Industry - 2009

CD

Cold Meat Industry presents the new release by Eldar, a Barcelona-based project born in 2004 and already active with two obscure CDrs produced by Skulline. "Sapere Aude" reveals them in a more accomplished way and brings back a certain sound from the very early days of the prestigious Swedish label: the low-key noise and ambient strata, occasional voice samples and unobtrusive percussions, indeed, recall of Archon Satani, Inanna or even of Raison d'être's "Prospectus I". The atmosphere is oppressing, the sounds bleak and raw, just like in the first outputs of those death industrial prime-movers. Some may complain about the far from perfect sound quality of this CD, but, on the contrary, one of the winning features of "Sapere Aude" is definitely its unpolished profile.

According to the notes, each song was conceived in collaboration with a different artist, mostly Spanish ones (the by now well-known Der Blaue Reiter, and other unknown names, such as Argentum, Verbum, Persona or Escuadron De La Muerte). However, the CD sounds very continuous as a whole, so you can't notice their contributions very much. Eldar give their best in tracks like "Aevum VI", worth of BDN's "Pain In Progress" (slow and suffocating, with a repetitive metal thud, some kind of weary melody and even a Mussolini sample declaming in the background), "Una Madre Reptil En El Nido" (probably the album's highlight, powerful and martial, even if always with that sensation of disease affecting the sound and the general atmosphere you breath in the music), or "Contubernio" (with more significant martial percussions and acoustic strings, closer to the early Raison d'être). Maybe, they could have just cut out the last four tracks, not particularly impressive and completely loosing the tension created by the effective previous ones.

Obviously, these Catalans don't invent anything, but they manage to give us back that special obscure homemade feeling we became addicted to back in the days, and lately mostly disappeared from the dark ambient and industrial scene. A bit of a nostalgic release, maybe. But a good one, for sure.

- Simon V.

Website: http://eldar-eldar.blogspot.com

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/eldarmerinee

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