Artist: Morbikon
Country: USA
Label: Tankcrimes Records
Formats: LP / CD
Year: 2025
The downside of reviewing music is that you “have” to do that in a rather short amount of time and since we are being flooded with new releases on a daily basis, sometimes it means you can only listen to each of those new pieces of music a couple of times. Sometimes it would be good to come back to an album a couple of weeks later to see how it stuck with you and then make a well-considered judgement. It could very well be that the review I wrote for Morbikon’s debut would come out rather differently.
At the time, I wrote that Morbikon was a good example of a band that was more or less created for the occasion by musicians who usually show or showed their skills in completely different bands (Municipal Waste, Exit-13, Iron Reagan, Cannabis Corpse, …And Oceans, etc.). Now that I’ve listened to the album a few times for the review of this new work, I’m a lot less convinced that forming this band was really a good idea. The Melodic Black Metal of these gentlemen sounds pretty good, but it’s actually completely soulless, the passion and dedication seem to be completely missing. I have often concluded that black metal is not just a musical style that you can play ‘just like that’, but that it is really an art that you have to master as a musician. In other words, Morbikon delivers black metal as if it came from an online course for dummies.
This second album, ‘Lost Within The Astral Crypts’ is basically a repetition of what they’ve done on ‘Ov Mournful Light’. Even writing “Ov” instead of “Of” is as just cheesy as writing “kvlt” and says a lot about the level we are dealing with. Deicide’s Glenn Benton complained that lots of nowadays Death Metal bands look like Weezer, well, the same applies to Black Metal. Just take a look at these guys, Black Metal used to be dangerous and not safe and friendly.
Musically then. ‘Lost Within The Astral Crypts’ is not a bad record in the true sense of that word, and it is evident that these guys can play their instruments well. But again it is just fast music with guitar leads and harsh vocals, it never feels genuine or sincere. I have dropped the term “entry level” quite a few times the past months, but this is another one of such examples that might be a suitable introductory band into the world of Black Metal. Yet, every kid who gets into this music through Morbikon will only be amazed by all the great stuff that’s still out there to be discovered.
