HRIZG

Ever experienced an album that seems to have all the right ingredients and a taste that is pleasingly familiar, but as a meal lacks enough distinctness to jog the memory the next time you look at a menu? HRIZG's "Anthems to Decreptitude" is one of those albums. It is a black metal stew made from doomy, atmospheric, and traditional/old-school ingredients that on the whole sates the taste buds, but never really excites them.

What all that incessantly metaphorical descriptiveness means is that "Anthems to Decreptitude" will please the loyalists and do nothing to tarnish Moribund's tradition of releasing grainy-imaged, eerily ethereal, and gritty black metal releases. It does however drag in spots and a little too much of the pattern-recycling going on becomes familiar to a fault. There are times when one also gets the feeling that a few integral parts were lost in the translation. What can be stated with confidence is that Spanish one-man-band HRIZG paid attention to detail in creating an album that is morbidly atmospheric, but not total "post" or "shoe gaze," occasionally suicidal, and inclusive of quite a bit of tempo variation (i.e. droning march to blasting mayhem). A comparatively intelligible vocal approach sometimes clashes with lyric content that is almost too literal for its own good, though the deliverance of evil still convinces. The compositional foundation is sturdy as well and HRIZG hits a good deal more than it misses. Interestingly enough, it is on those occasions during which the moody, the atmospheric, and the instrumental is emphasized, such as on the richly textured and majestic "Broken Shield", where the guy really seems to be in his element.

Let's put it this way; if a random stranger was to stop me on the street and ask what I thought of HRIZG's "Anthems to Decrepitude", my answer would go something like this: "Not too bad; I like it, but it doesn't really move me very far in any one direction". Does that sound like a better than average, but far from essential, black metal album? That's good because that's what it is.