They might not be well known outside of France, but Gorgon were one of the earliest French black metal bands, formed back in 1991 by bandleader and guitarist Christophe Chatelet. Usually when I think of older French black metal, it's the LLN and associated weirdoes that spring to mind, but Gorgon was a couple of years ahead of all of that. For the first few years that they were active, Gorgon only released a handful of demo cassettes, and it wasn't until 1995 that they finally got around to recording and releasing their first album on the Dungeon Records label. The Lady Rides A Black Horse has a very different sound from a lot of the black metal that France was producing back then, with an old-school thrashing black attack influenced by Venom and second wave black metal bands like early Mayhem and Osmose acts Samael and Impaled Nazarene. And it's maniacal sounding stuff, with ferocious blackened thrash riffs and awesome shrieking Burzumic vokills, classic heavy metal gallop infused into the darkness along with murky horror movie soundtrack synthesizers, doom-laden gothic passages, droning dark ambience, and eerie whispered vocals that appear throughout the album. Lots of mid-tempo rocking, too, like on the raging "As A Stone", one of the most rocking and anthemic songs on the album. It was on the excellent blog Cosmic Hearse where I first discovered Gorgon's satanic delirium aboiut a year ago, but since then the UK black metal label Todestrieb has stepped up and re-issued Gorgon's eleven song debut along with two previously unreleased tracks from 1994, and Gorgon's three-song Immortal Horde 7" from 1993, and includes a newly designed booklet filled with images of shirtless young French men splattered in gore, a mascara-smeared young lady wielding a sword, and the complete album lyrics.