IMHA TARIKAT

For reasons that may be a mystery to even the band themselves, IMHA TARIKAT's take on furious black metal hits differently. All the necessary ingredients are there — the morbid, dissonant guitars, the wrathful screams, the battle between all-out blitzkrieg and more atmospheric modes of oppression — but the end result exists in an entirely different realm from the forest-dwelling, night-sky worshipping extremity of the frozen North. In keeping with many of Germany's black metal diehards, IMHA TARIKAT use their riffs and momentum to conjure dark magic, stripping everything down to a live band's primitive core, and simply playing as if their lives depend on it. "Bursting passion" proclaims their Bandcamp page: a succinct statement of intent that rings truer with each successive album.

Where many black metal bands intend to obliterate, IMHA TARIKAT prefer to sweep everyone along with them, like innocents surrendered to the whirlwind. Released amid the bewildered blinking that accompanied the world's post-Covid exhalation, 2022's "Hearts Unchained – At War with a Passionless World" was an exhilarating roar of unholy bravado, and the first of the band's albums to get the attention it deserved. Three years on, creative driving force Ruhsuz Cellât seems more determined than ever to pin his audience to the back wall of whichever brutalist dungeon they find themselves trapped in. "Confessing Darkness" is even more electrified and belligerent than its predecessor, with some of the most intense material the band have ever attempted, along with several more perverse variations on a blackened theme.

There are times when a dependence on relentless blastbeats can become wearying, but even at their most myopic, IMHA TARIKAT are always striving to do something interesting. "Confessing Darkness" is an exercise in sophisticated songwriting, delivered by sledgehammer. The opening onslaught of "Wicked Shrine" makes no bones about its desire to get the blood pumping, as Cellât's gruff bellow cuts through like a militant with a megaphone. But even as it rips the world a new one, "Wicked Shrine" is dense with ghost melodies that seep through fine cracks in a blistered and bilious wall of guitars. Again, it just hits differently. With discernible echoes of KILLING JOKE's apocalyptic proselytizing, "Excellent Grief" revels in an abundance of haunted melody, switches to primitive speed metal in the blink of a swollen eye, and screams off toward a bloody horizon, fixated on some malevolent triumph. The title track's expansive, runaway wrecking machine is even more overwhelming: IMHA TARIKAT sound drunk on repetition, but newly committed to harnessing this tornado, as riffs swirl and scythe, creating a powerful ebb and flow that threatens to spin out of control for seven exhilarating minutes. Meanwhile, "Memoria Dei (Profanity and The Devil)" takes a circuitous route toward its grim, old-school destination, assimilating a folk-ish, mid-tempo stomp and claustrophobic noise rock sensibilities into its convoluted web of murderous intrigue.

Simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting, this is not a musical experience to be taken lightly. These songs are powered by startling levels of energy and intensity, but there is real artistry woven through every inch of what is an otherwise sustained and uncompromising assault. IMHA TARIKAT are true individuals in an often-homogenous scene, and that makes them seem a lot more in tune with black metal's first principles than most. And like the revered works of the early '90s BM greats, "Confessing Darkness" is strange, sinister and insanely exciting.