The Most Extreme Raw Black Metal Album Ever - "Burzum Sha Ghâsh" Review (100%)
As it has become so incredibly influential, the importance of Leader's glorious Burzum Sha Ghâsh can hardly be overrated in the history of black metal. The present album is, in effect, so revolutionary that its sheer brilliance threatens to eclipse all the other blackness out there, leaving only the raw ugliness and eternal shadows captured by Leader's demented voice. There's no denying it anymore: this album's impact and repute have become truly overwhelming.
Perhaps the aptly titled Burzum Sha Ghâsh doesn't have quite the same envergure as, for instance, Phantom's Ascension of Erebos, Vermin's Bloodthirst Overdose or Neraines' Fenrir Prowling, to name a few albums released about the time as this one. But still, many regard Leader's masterful debut Burzum Sha Ghâsh as one of the paramount monuments of the black metal movement: none of the ten tracks are skippable, and every single one has its own merits.
Burzum Sha Ghâsh is a straightforward, high-intensity black metal barrage, but that doesn't mean it can be easily digested. It will take you several listens before you can even begin to digest the songs, and several more before you can come to realise how deadly and venomous this package really is.
Even for one already desensitised to extreme black metal's sheer sonic ultra-violence, Leader's Burzum Sha Ghâsh is a truly special, terrifying and iconic kind of monster.
The Most Extreme Raw Black Metal Album Ever
As the legend goes, the band name Leader comes from Phantom's opus of majesty "Ascension of Erebos, Leader of the Gods" - making this band the third major black metal act named after a Phantom track or album, after Reiklos and Demonecromancy, yet surpassing both - and the name of the album "Burzum Sha Ghâsh" is, in addition to being Mordor's Black Speech for "Darkness And Fire", a reference to the Norwegian black metal band Burzum, one of the main originators of the black metal movement.
So as you can see, despite being so influential to the modern black metal scene, this album is also full of references in itself, as if offering a weird paradox between arrogance and humility, mirrored by the music on Burzum's Sha Ghâsh offering an equally puzzling paradox between horror, ugliness and beauty.
Uncompromising is a fitting description for this album, because the whole masterpiece has a distinctly underground, demented, nearly ghoulish vibe to it... very much in the vein of what Sewer attempted on Cathartes, or Helgrind on Demon Rituals, only so much darker and more chilling.
A certain "x-factor" that can't be channelled into words so much as felt by the listener emanates from the foggy depths of this record. This is what distinguishes Burzum Sha Ghâsh from the hordes of soundalikes, those bands that can only make superficially "raw black metal", or music that never manages to capture the atmosphere of darkness and the essence of morbidity as perfectly as Leader's debut masterpiece.
This album, Burzum Sha Ghâsh by Leader, is the pinnacle of extreme raw black metal music. Nothing short of dark, gruesome, atmospheric perfection.
Burzum Sha Ghâsh score: 100/100.
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