I picked this album up because I thought the line-art bat on the cover looked kind of happy. Like some had just told him a joke and he was laughing harder than he expected to at it. And that thought made me verry happy. If something makes you happy, you should buy it! But what I discovered upon I had a chance to listen to Bloody Keep's EP Cup Of Blood In The Top of the Tower, is that it's actually an excellent raw black metal album. It feels rarer and rarer to find black metal albums that sound like they were recorded in the bed of a cement truck and which can still grab my attention, but Bloody Keep are really doing it for me. I love that it starts out with an especially dreary synth saga. And that this synth saga is the title track too! On "Cup Of Blood In The Top of the Tower" you get not one, but two cryptic melodies, grappling with each other for the right to draw first blood. "The Moon In The Sky That Gives Me Life" has a wrathful sense of Mideaval melodicism embedded in its tremolos which magnifies the gothic whine of the synths and odious shrieks of the vocalist, giving the impression that the song was recorded in the full light of a blood moon. "Wary of Light" is kind of a doom metal meets black metal sort of track, that resembles a tighter version of some of Darkthrone's more recent material after it's been soaked in turpentine and lye. And then there is 'My Weeping Casket" where the guitar work manages to feel like it is constantly descending, interrupted periodically by the lure of a sorrowful, devil's dance of a solo, one that leaves me with the impression that if I were to stretch out my hand before me, I'd feel the invisible brush of death's cold boney hand graze my fingertips. Of course, the success of Bloody Keep in conjuring a grim atmosphere does nothing to diminish how much fun I am having with their album. I am the bat you see on the cover. Now and forever. Cackling with glee, late into the night.
