Band:	Vilkacis
Album:	Beyond The Mortal Gate
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	March 2018

01. Snowfall By Torchlight
02. Defiance
03. Sixty Three
04. Spiritual Retribution
05. Boundless Spell Of Realization
06. Beyond The Mortal Gate

The individual is weak; conventions are strong. Please follow the rules and look down on yourself for not being successful enough. Black metal has followed this path and declined into a depression fest. Vilkacis is a one-man black metal band from New York; Beyond The Mortal Gate is the band's first full-length. "Vilkacis" means "werewolf" in Latvian.

The convention in black metal at the moment is a depressive touch; it's often slow-paced with a touch of doom. That's the most experimental style and it's the coolest place to be - Skáphe, Leviathan, Tchornobog - these bands are more or less putting their vomit of depression into sound, a convention that probably is connected to the decline of individuality. Beyond The Mortal Gate is a life-affirming album. The album starts off where Nietzsche packed his bags and left for immortality. Nietzsche's latest writing was the crowning of a king - he crowned himself king. According to himself, he was the best philosopher and a truly great example of a human being. The writings were deemed insane and seen as a product of megalomania.

On Beyond The Mortal Gate, we are crowning a king, and that king is Vilkacis himself. "He will sit on the throne and spit at the angels below his feet". "The winds shall remember his name". This album is lyrically about Vilkacis himself and the position he will have in the coming future. It's an energetic and fast-paced album that has riffs galore, a relentless attack. The vocals are powerful and mighty, gasping out orders in a spiritual war against weak human morals and shame. This is an album that proposes the morals of Marquis de Sade and to be free from the shackles of convention. But at the same time the constantly barging black metal riffs have a slight tone of melancholy and, as with Nietzsche, the lyrics hint at mental struggles. As black metal should be, this is a misanthropic album, but the hate for humans and their conventions comes with a glorification of the self.

Vomit and depression have made nice subjects for black metal lately. Thematically this a strong album, and despite having some of the most awesome black metal riffs this year, musically Vilkacis's laughing and howly black metal isn't always as entrancing as some of the bands that have a more negative tone. Vilkacis's Bandcamp states that "discussion of innovation and evolution miss the point of Vilkacis." Vilkacis's black metal is a misanthropic laughter that howls from the throne of black metal, but down here below his feet it sounds like conventions at times. These are conventions that sound awesome, but if depression and vomiting are gonna be forced to sit at the feet of laughter and the glorification of the self, the howls of the werewolf should be a more demented war of the spirit.