Band:	Arnaut Pavle
Album:	Transylvanian Glare
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	January 2023

01. Come Curses
02. Viperblood Transfusion
03. With Sulfur Carriage
04. Baptized In Jesus' Piss
05. Transylvanian Glare
06. Final Descent
07. Judgement From Below
08. Call From The Void
09. On A Shrine Of Rats

Of course the Darkthrone worship album will have "Transylvanian" in its title!

Arnaut Pavle is a band I've come in contact through their connection to the Mystískaos collective/label, back when I listened to anything that was associated with them. Arnaut Pavle were not among the first to come to mind and stay among my favs from that period, but their two self-titled releases, a demo and an LP, were enough to instantly spark something when I came across this new release. Mystískaos is less of a presence than they were a few years ago, so any release feels like a lost memory. This one did stand out for being the punkier of the bunch, so here it is, the first one of Arnaut Pavle's release not to be a self-titled.

The band's previous releases occupied a pretty neat lane of raw second-wave worship that infused some punk energy that thrived on the common rawness between them. Simply put, they wrote killer riffs. Seeing the tracklist for this one, song titled like "Baptized in Jesus Piss" felt a bit too tacky for their own good, but that initial bad taste dissipated with the sound of the album. I named Darkthrone as the obvious source of inspiration for this for two reasons. One is that the band somehow manages to still have a very strong inkling towards an atmospheric focus despite the riffy second-wave sound. And that's something that you'd generally expect to work with longer song structures, but the shorter form songs somehow still manages to infuse atmosphere through more than rawness alone.

On the other hand, Darkthrone have gotten crustier with time. Arnaut Pavle are a bit more on the D-beat side of punk, but that's something that really amps up the intensity of the sound and works with the shorter songs. With the album being seconds away but still shorter than half an hour, it breezes by, finding just the right balance between immediate impact and a compelling sound. There's D-beat drumming, second-wave tremolo picking, a surprisingly strong bass, some manic pace changes, atmospheric sections, elaborate guitar work, and just generally the stuff that you'd generally expect from such a combo, but taken a notch above the average quality.

Stylistically, not much changed for Arnaut Pavle, but this is a band with clearly a lot more years of refinement under their belt than when we last left them. As your resident (almost) Transylvanian, I can attest that Transylvanian Glare is a pretty compelling neckbreaker.