LURING
LURING “Triumphant Fall of the Malevolent Christ”
By Dr. Abner Mality
The dungeon synth craze in black metal has gotten to the point where it damages the metal content of the genre. LURING, an American band that is new to me, falls prey to this tendency and it keeps this record from achieving all that it could. That being said, when these guys hit their mark, they’re very good if you like classically murky and Satanic black metal of the 90’s.
We get a boring and too long synth intro “Crucifixion of the Swine” to start us off on the wrong cloven hoof, but with “Where Forgotten Spirits Dwell”, things snap into place. This is raw and ugly black metal in early GORGOROTH fashion...not too “Norse” but drawing influence from the classics. Most of the vocals are coming from a crypt somewhere, but there are death grunts, too.
The rest of the album bounces around stylistically, with a slow and gloomy “Strewn Carcass of Christ”, a multi-pronged riff-fest “Axes of Vengeance” and more dungeon synth with “Beyond the Boundaries of Human Life”. The synth works better when it’s integrated into the cobwebbed and cryptic black metal of something like “Death Is the Master I Obey” rather than on its own. Maybe some brothers of the night enjoy the minimalist synth stuff as much as the murky black metal, but not me. I generally prefer the more metallic stuff. And there’s just enough of it here to make this an album I can recommend. LURING is a band to maybe watch out for in this genre.”