Album: Obsidian Kingdom - Mantiis (An Agony In Fourteen Bites)

Band: Obsidian Kingdom
Album: Mantiis (An Agony In Fourteen Bites)
Label: Self Released
Year: 2012










Tracklist
01. Not Yet Five  
02. Oncoming Dark  
03. Through The Glass  
04. Cinnamon Balls  
05. The Nurse  
06. Answers Revealing  
07. Last Of The Light  
08. Genteel To Mention  
09. Awake Until Dawn
10. Haunts Of The Underworld
11. Endless Wall
12. Fingers In Anguish
13. Ball-Room
14. And Then It Was
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Obsidian Kingdom is an independent music project founded in Barcelona in 2005. The band plays hard-to-classify heavy music with plenty of contrasts.

The band was born as a vehicle for its members to express dark emotions and explore their technical capacities, while striving for complexity within a raw and aggressive sound. Their first reference is the MCS “Matter” (2007), a conceptual work with a strong occultist inspiration, with the four natural elements as main lyrical theme.

Obsidian Kingdom continued to explore their musical limits; process which eventually culminated in the writing and pre-recording of an unborn child: “Fera”. This unpublished album explored the emotions and states of mind related to human atavistic fears. Only a little sample of “Fera” would be released as an EP, entitled “3:11” (2010), where the guitar tuning dropped to C and the minimal melodic expression (based mainly in semitone variations) is compensated by a great rhythmic complexity.

After almost two years of intense work, Obsidian Kingdom publishes its most ambitious project. “Mantiis – An Agony In Fourteen Bites” (2012) is a conceptual album, featuring a single song divided into fourteen tracks which flow through different genres. Taking part in the long-lived tradition of rock operas – such as those created by David Bowie or King Diamond –, the album embarks the listener in an eerie musical trip, noted for the coherent exploration of a wide range of styles and emotions. With a progressive character and a post-modern approach, its influences can be traced from the melancholy of Akira Yamaoka to the heaviness of Cult of Luna, including the experimental style of Ulver or Pink Floyd sound’s heritage.

The main features of Obsidian Kingdom's music are the use of multiple sound resources in order to portray a wide range of emotions; a deep interest for aesthetics and the mise-en-scène; and the sombre and cryptic quality of their lyrical topics. Defying both tradition and their black metal origins, Obsidian Kingdom continue to tread their own path in an untiring search for their own unique style, aside from convention or style boundaries.

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