Totalling a little over 103,000 Latin words, these include four constitutions, nine decrees, and three declarations. Its tangible results were the sixteen documents adopted by overwhelming majorities of bishops (though often after long and occasionally heated debates and significant amendments) and approved by the pope. Responses ranged far and wide, but the 2,150 replies and 76.4 percent response rate suggest a high degree of interest on the part of the hierarchy. The council met in four two-month sessions, October to December, from 1962 to 1965. The bishops taking part in Vatican II -some 2,860 of them attended some or all of it- came from every part of the world: Europe (39 percent), North America (14 percent), South America (18 percent), Central America (3 percent), Asia (12 percent), Africa (12 percent), and Oceania (2 percent). Their intensity suggests that, in spite of the pull of history - toward an ever-increasingly-distant past, legend turned cartoonish myth - this blackened variety of metal is stubbornly, snarlingly…alive? Whatever degree of earnestness you may grant the players’ artistic and ideological intents, the sounds are strong, gravid and grim. But when the song’s cacophony kicks into serious action, its whirl and churn are hard to argue with. You may roll your eyes at all the pealing church bells, then again at the segue into portentous drums and riffage. Can we take Concilium seriously, or do we dismiss Desecration as another threadbare bromide, a moldy cowl best left in a dusty corner? Songs like “Sacred Land of Impure Blood” offer an ambiguous array of answers. Those tonal elements don’t entirely solve the problem: When does the audience’s impatience with near-exhausted gestures of kvlty threat and “evil” render the music moribund (in all the wrong ways)? The songs on Desecration are dependent on mood, rather than technique or musicality, and that makes them especially vulnerable to the listener’s own temperament. The second half of Desecration, which slows the pace considerably, is particularly effective, an experience that manages simultaneously to communicate the brittleness of desiccated material and the soddenness of rot. Concilium’s compositions and sonic textures are pitched somewhere between Cthonica at that band’s most coherent and Black Chilice at their most chaotic. The sounds are aggressively thick, a species of blackened death metal that tends more toward muscular rumble than icy riffing. Benighted? For sure - in ways that slither and shamble purposefully into the gloom. But while Concilium isn’t attempting to innovate or elevate, the music you’ll encounter on Desecration isn’t as witless, cretinous or crude as those associated bandnames suggest. Concilium is a fairly recent project, based in Lisbon and featuring members of bands with inspired handles like Scum Liquor, Spitgrave and Cunnilingus. That’s not really so hard to answer: Listen to it. So what are we supposed to do with yet another new record that features such hoary (and maybe risible) elements as a cover image of Lucifer, rampant and tortured band members who call themselves “Vulturis” and “Belial Necro” and songs with titles like “From the Chalice,” “Shadow Gospels” and “Blood on the Altar”? Those mainstream outlets have focused on the early-1990s Norwegian scene, ticking through the usual anecdotes and subcultural furniture: church burning, homophobic murder and Satanist posturing, with all that legitimately hair-raising phenomena threatening to become the stuff of stereotype. Black metal is drawn by its nature to obscurity and shadow, but it seems to have broken through to wider attention see the several popular documentaries (particularly Until the Light Takes Us, which has been in Netflix’s rotation), a feature film (not so great) and serious (if occasionally condescending and hyperventilating) profiles and critical pieces in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Guardian and Buzzfeed, among other high-gloss, high-prestige or trendy venues. It’s been widely observed that metal is a musical genre strongly - perhaps obsessively - conscious of its own history, much of which has occurred in spaces largely beyond mass culture’s spastic and easily distracted view.
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