Just found some of the last copies of this French black metal ritual from Glorior Belli...
Noone delivers progressive, forward-thinking black metal the way the French do, and I can never get enough French black metal. I'm constantly listening to bands like Alcest, Blut Aus Nord, Spektr, and Deathspell Omega over here, and another French band that I finally hear not long ago that has been equally kicking my ass is Glorior Belli, who released their last album Manifesting The Raging Beast through Southern Lord about a year ago. This band is kind of a French black metal supergroup, made up of members of bands like Merrimack, Obscurus Advocam, Slavian and Black Flame, but if anything, Glorior Belli channels a similiar brand of discordant, dissonant black metal as Deathspell Omega throughout these eight songs. Seriously, Deathspell Omega fans will love these guys. Their sound is filled with a similiar sort of seasick riffery and epic, apocalyptic leads, the guitars lurching through angular mathy riffs and dense highspeed buzz, drums going from full-on blast to strange sputtering mid-paced rhythms and that weird sort of blackened, disorienting Slint-esque mathrock dissonance that really gets them the Deathspell comparison. The songs are complex and intricate, made up of assorted passages of raging blackened thrash and passages of warped post-rock n' chiming melodies and waltzing, discordant doominess, and amazingly catchy melodic lines are strewn all across the songs, making this both as grim and fearsome as Deathspell while injecting the music with a unique melodic quality of their own. And like both Deathspell and Funeral Mist, Glorior Belli have given their album a MASSIVE recording that's way heavier and thicker sounding than most black metal albums, infusing their discordant satanic blasts with a crushing presence. I love this album! It's another essential disc for anyone into the super-raging blackness of Deathspell, Funeral Mist, Katharsis, and Watain!