CULTUS PROFANO - Sacramentum Obscurus review

CULTUS PROFANO - Sacramentum Obscurus

Debemur Morti Productions




So it's the closing days of February aka: Black Metal History Month. Yeah I know the whole BMHM thing is kind of a joke. Diehard fans resent it, the mainstream metal media uses it to mock the genre but for me I use it as a excuse to post music from Youtube by obscure BM on Facebook. So with that said it is fitting that here we have a new band that is the epitome of black metal especially in the old school sounding sense.

CULTUS PROFANO is a black metal male/female duo hailing from Los Angeles, CA. Ah yeah I know plenty in the extreme BM community who throw hate on black metal from places like Los Angeles as well as New York, San Fran and Seattle, especially Seattle. I won't argue against that because there's good reason for the hate. It's all about hipsters or phony losers trying to capitalize on a popular music genre. But CULTUS PROFANO has more street cred than I'd say most of the haters. 

This duo, which began in 2016, consists of Advorsus (drums & vocals) and Strzyga (guitar & vocals). Advorsus (aka: Arthur Mendiola) is also the drummer for long time death metal act SADISTIC INTENT as well as a bunch of other extreme acts. There's your street cred and yeah I have an old release by them so forget the hate and listen to the music. Which by the way sounds like Norwegian black metal 1992.

On a whole this somewhat reminds me musically of Wrath of the Tyrant era EMPEROR meets A Blaze in the Northern Sky era DARKTHRONE. The vocals are shared but Advorsus' is rough and grunt whereas Strzyga's is pure venomous sounding. She kinda reminds me of Ihsahn's screams. Listening to these nine cuts it's hard not to think of pure darkness with two sinister white faces staring back at you. The riffs are icy and sharp with a cool flair tempo and speed change ups giving certain cuts this enveloping feeling. Drumming is mostly typical blast beating but sound-wise they're muffled in order to not overwhelm. 

If CULTUS PROFANO's beginning vision with Sacramentum Obscurus was to create an absolutely perfect black metal album then they succeeded. This is blasphemy in it's purest sense.


https://www.debemur-morti.com/en/

https://cultusprofano.bandcamp.com/releases

https://www.facebook.com/CULTUS.PROFANO