Melded together in the vein of classic black metal, but giving nods to other genres including death, grind and doom, Toronto's Plague Weaver has been honing their craft delicately since they started out in 2018. Beginning with an excellent atmosphere, and budding riff ideas on the self-titled EP, then taking a big leap in 2020 with “Through The Sulphur Eyes” with a doomy traditional black metal style. Now in 2021, with their first full length “Ascendant Blasphemy”, they have created three leaping bounds between releases, in both the music and the production. The band talks about the album:
“We take influence from a wide spectrum of genres. Black metal is definitely not the limit – we also look to death, grind, doom, and heavy metal, along with a plethora of non-metal genres. The only real common denominator is whether or not we like it! You can hear a huge death/grind influence in JC’s ‘black metal’ vocals, while RM’s riffing style is much more reminiscent of 1st wave black metal, especially Greek bands.”
“Ascendant Blasphemy” contains a lot of musical variety across the album, and still enough consistency to hold everything together, overall it is a pretty cold journey from start to finish. The album’s tracks are quite diverse in terms of tempo, and sonic tone. There are equal parts mid and fast-paced tracks, with a couple of slow, doomy ones near the end, to help bring everything to a close. This album confidently pulls the listener in a few choice directions. With confident composition, the instrumentals lay a framework for powerful, diverse, and seemingly uncontrolled vocals. The riff-driven style is bound to attract some death metal listeners in addition to BM heads looking for something grim to bang their heads to.