DEPARTURE CHANDELIER - Antichrist Rise To Power LP (MARBLE) (French ed.)
After the success of Antichrist Rise To Power original release in 2019 on Nuclear War Now! Productions with over ten subsequent pressings the band felt there should be a official French version with complete text translation and expanded layout on the most cult label from France - Osmose Productions.
Departure Chandelier’s music shimmers with the aesthetic ardor of apotheosis. It is a communion with the deceased, tracing the pathway of life transmuted into death over dishonor. Although comprised of members of Akitsa and Ash Pool, Departure Chandelier is wholly unique in style and substance and bears little overt resemblance to either of those projects. Recorded nearly a decade ago, Departure Chandelier’s debut album, Antichrist Rise to Power, actually preceded the band’s demo, The Black Crest of Death, The Gold Wreath of War, which was released in 2011 on Tour De Garde. Recorded in a basement at grave-level behind the New York City Marble Cemetery (the oldest cemetery in New York City), established as a repository for the dead in 1831, just a decade after Napoleon’s death. Within the gates of the small graveyard (where photography for the album was taken during a rare snowstorm) each plot is commemorated with a marble tomb.
Compositionally, one hears the heavy influence of Bathory and other seminal acts overwritten by the sound of classic French black metal such as Osculum Infame, Bekhira, Chemin de Haine, Cantus Bestiae, and Machiavel. The tracks are rich in melody interspersed with an air of intransigent pride and adorned in the opulent ornamentalism of aristocracy and empire. Keyboard stabs and swells outline the riffs, accentuating the guitar’s stately thrust. Rising out of the music, the vocals seethe, the commingled expression of scorn for life and spiritual dissent. The recording manages to capture the best elements of raw black metal, leaving the guitars brittle and charged, while simultaneously supplying depth and balance. The juxtaposition between the lean, stripped down essence of the recording with the ornate and complex melodies and florid compositional accents is a perfect complement to the album’s boldly unique detail of the Napoleonic era.
Ltd. 400x heavyweight marble (transparent yellow/black) 12"(180g) in a black poly-lined innersleeve, poster A2 on 150g art-paper; gatefold jacket, black flood inside, printed on 350g, all assembled in a plastic overbag.
Osmose 2023