In the long hours of night when the daylight will not come, when the ghosts of the past and the devils of the present toy with your sanity and dissect your sense of self and self respect…when the first razor cut, made with trembling hand, sends a shocking stream of crimson crawling sluggishly across the sickly pale white of your sun-starved skin…when there is no comfort to be found and you are lost in a shadowed labyrinth of torment and grief, sinking in a morass of blood and tears…on a night like this there is no salvation in the bottle or the needle. There is no god in heaven and no fallen angel in hell. There is only the emptiness that cannot be filled and the unbearable loneliness that gnaws at your soul. And the unshakeable certainty that there is no way out.
Following on from last year’s bleak and disconsolate Wounds single, Finland’s purveyors of ‘Anti-Life Black Metal Misery’, Grave With A View, have returned with their most powerful and harrowing release to date – Raw Illumination. A full length album steeped in isolation, violence, self destruction and death, Raw Illumination is not an album for the faint of heart or the fragile of spirit. Exploding into life with a sound like shattering ice, opening track and single ‘Cold Flesh Peregrination’ is an unforgiving, harsh and decidedly unwelcoming introduction to this album of breathtaking wickedness. The acid whip of ‘The Lash’ follows – flaying the skin with its relentless, sadistic blows and exposing every insecurity and fear, humiliation and shame; it’s a maelstrom of emotions and overwhelming darkness. And there is no let up, no chink of light in the darkness as we are exposed to the seething aggression of ‘To The Beat Of Broken Bones’ and the funeral procession of ‘Loathe’ which carries us to the crumbling lip of our waiting grave. Rife with driving riffs and punishing rhythms, ripped apart by tortured vocal exhortations and wreathed in an atmosphere of agony, Raw Illumination is black metal from the deepest pits of absolute despondency, right to the last glass shard notes of ‘These Meaningless Gestures’ which leaves you with the taste of ashes and loss in your mouth, the sheer disappointment of tarnished dreams and the ultimate understanding of the futility of life.
Recorded and mixed by O.H.R and mastered by Haldor Grunberg at Satanic Audio (Behemoth, Dopelord, Christ Agony etc), Raw Illumination is the sonic distillation of caustic chaos and grim, unmitigated despair – every malicious note cutting straight to the bone – and its aura of desperate degradation has been perfectly captured in the cover imagery; the artwork and layout by Danny The Destroyer, utilising powerful, unsettling images of model Anna Iivana Julma, captured by the band. When it crawls from the crypts of label Dusktone on November 29th, Raw Illumination will hunt down the broken and the flawed, the outcasts and the lepers and swallow them into its maw of ice and pain.
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