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Dark Fortress are a band from Germany that has had music reviewed before in this zine and on this recording plays a very atmospheric, melodic and progressive form of black metal and this is a review of their live 2025 album "Anthems From Beyond The Grave - Live In Europe 2023" which will be released on January 17th by Century Media Records.
A very distorted sounding intro starts off the album along with some live audience interaction before going into more of a heavier direction. Atmospheric sounding keyboards can also be heard at times while the vocals are mostly grim sounding black metal screams and all of the musical instruments also have a very powerful sound to them.
When the music speeds up a great amount of tremolo picking and blast b eats can be heard which also gives the songs more of a raw feeling. A great portion of the tracks are also very long and epic in length along with the riffs also adding in a lot of melody and throughout the recording you can also hear a good mixture of slow, mid paced and fast parts.
When guitar solos and leads are utilized they are also done in a very melodic style along with some of the tracks also adding in a small amount of clean playing . Clear vocals are also added on a few songs, at times the music also gets very progressive sounding. the production sounds very professional while the lyrics cover death, dark fantasy, occultism, transcendence and space themes.
In my opinion this is another great sounding recording from Dark Fortress and if you are a fan of atmospheric, melodic and progressive black metal, you should check out this live album. RECOMMENDED TRACKS INCLUDE "CataWomb" "Pulling At Threads" "To Harvest The Artifacts Of Mockery" and "Baphoment". 8 out of 10.
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