There was a time when most black metal was firmly in the grip of its initial, ideological myopia. Thanks to a more imaginative and progressive generation of musicians, the scene is now much more capable of thinking outside the box.
Bianca is a shadowy project led by Enrico Schettino, guitarist with maverick death metallers Hour Of Penance. Eschewing the usual blend of Satanism and petulant rebellion for a grandiose explosion of humanistic thinking and feminine power, this first foray is a quietly radical affair.
With powerhouse vocals, both clean and unclean, from mercurial frontwoman Bianca Loðbrók, these songs twist black metal into elegant, emotionally potent shapes. Inevitably, there are a few moments where Loðbrók’s ethereal voice leads Bianca to resonances familiar from the last 30 years of female-led extreme (and not so extreme) metal.
The malevolent drift of opener The Dawn is gorgeous, unnerving and surreal, and has more in common with Dead Can Dance than anything metallic. But when the epic pummel of Abysmal kicks into its higher gears, it becomes abundantly clear that Bianca are vicious and untamed, their singer’s obvious dexterity and charisma acting as a diversionary tactic to draw listeners into the harrowing heart of the storm.
Schettino’s riffs are uniformly abrasive and dramatic: bilious undercurrents to the skewed beauty of Loðbrók’s melodies. Songs like Somniloquies offer a bewildering rush of tangential side-steps and atmospheric clangour, as blastbeats rage and dissonance churns, and vocals veer wildly between angelic shimmer and barbarous fury.
Loðbrók’s screams will pin listeners to the wall, particularly on the epic Nachthexe, which hurtles down a blackened death metal path with occasional, devastating, melodic pauses in the frenzy.
The sum of all these parts could easily be a mess, but Bianca are supremely focused on sending shivers down spines, and as To The Twilight brings things to a dusky, unsettled conclusion, the only sensible response is to bask in this band’s fearsome originality.