BLAZAR
BLAZAR “Fatal Cosmic Wound”
By Dr. Abner Mality
I don’t think there’s any heavier subject than the phenomena of deep space. It’s a subject so utterly vast that it reduces all human history to nothingness. There’s nothing more forbidding than a black hole (except maybe Taylor Swift). That makes such cosmic events the perfect subject for a funeral doom band such as BLAZAR.
Named after a jet of superheated ionized gas, BLAZAR is from Spain and are inexorably, unstoppably heavy with a capital H. It’s rare that an album intro is anything more than a throwaway piece of predictable piffle, but “Aether” is a tremendous introduction to BLAZAR. Genuinely creepy, deep and disturbing synth sounds dripping with cosmic menace, it sets the table beautifully for the crushing title track, which just flattens everything in sight. A creepy crawling juggernaut of sound, this is the dark side of the universe personified and definitely one of my all-time favorite funeral doom tracks.
“Beyond the Event Horizon” is dark and heavy itself, but seems like a walk through a sunny meadow after the opening salvo. It is altogether more “typical” funeral doom in Yorkshire fashion...not bad at all, just not up to the opener. But the sinister spaced out tones of “Aeon” bring us back to the interstellar deeps. This band is just as brilliant with moody interludes as they are with their “full” tracks. “Aeon” leads to “Crystal Oblivion”, which is more crushing doom, and “Forgotten”, which injects more melody into the framework than we hear elsewhere. The album ends with the mysterious tones of another moody synth piece, “The Omega Phase”.
BLAZAR came out of nowhere like a dinosaur-killing asteroid to blow my listening apart. This is an outstanding album of cosmic, doomy dread.