Band:	Rhinocervs
Album:	RH-07
Style:	Dark Ambient, Black metal
Release date:	September 2011

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Most albums have stuff like album titles, track titles, or at the very least, a credited band. And then there's the more formless entity / label Rhinocervs feeling like black metal that is intentionally obscure.

We feature Rhinocervs here, and that is shaped like a band profile, but that is more for convenience's sake, as Rhinocervs is technically a label first and foremost, founded by the people behind Odz Manouk and Tukaaria , and all of its releases carry that name because that is the label that released them and that is the most discernable element as far as the artists behind the releases is concerned. But one could also look at Rhinocervs as a collective, sort of like but also related to the Black Twilight Circle, a lot of them projects of the aforementioned people, but perhaps more, with a lot of these projects compiled on the Odour Of Dust & Rot and Devour All the Living Things VAs. In between 2010 and 2013, the label released a bunch of uncredited and untitled albums, each technically its own band, with only the catalog number and the cover arts remaining as a means of separating each of them. Some catalog numbers are missing, some are out of order, but for the sake of this review, let's focus on RH-07.

He's a tape where all the track titles are also missing, so akin to the catalog number of each release, each track is only discernable by its place in the tracklist on each side of the tape. That's standard practice for Rhinocervs, as RH-11 is the only one that has its tracks titled and a runtime that's more fitting of an album alongside RH-8. Thus RH-07 is structurally the norm for the project, and yet it seems to be the one that received the most attention out of the bunch, and it surely isn't just because of the ghoul Ronald Reagan-like figure on the cover art. While the rest of the albums usually tackle some admittedly very good atmospheric black metal, it is RH-07 that feels most compelling in that aspect. There's mostly two reasons for it.

The first is that the production on it feels very unreal, with the uneven elements within it coming together to create something that feels hypnotic. There's a lot of it that feels really wrong, but keeps things on the side of things where it feels more compelling because of it rather than a hindrance to the listener. Some of the track transitions being pretty rough also wouldn't work without the obscure and mysterious nature of the tape and project, with there being a syncretism between the album's presentation and its idiosyncrasies. But that wouldn't work without the album's diverse range of sounds, which is my second point. More than just atmospheric black metal, with a lot of its slower heavier moments being strongly doom metal inspired, while also letting the ambient side of the album be about as developed as its metal side, leading to a huge chunk of the album exploring various dark ambient sounds rather than those acting as mere support towards the ambient black metal.

It is amazing to hear black metal with such a cosmic edge that doesn't rip off Darkspace, even if there is a slight element of that in the music, but some of the riffs here that are covered in the dense space murk are really hard hitting. "A3" especially has such a hypnotic melody in the riffs and the way they interact with the bells and choirs, in a swirling psychedelic black metal fashion overloaded with elements at its densest moments. Compared to the slightly dungeon-esque feel of the sparser dark ambient moments, that creates a nice contrast. The lo-fi element wouldn't work if the material beneath it wasn't as compelling in its melodies, and the more hypnotic moments of "A3", the more grandiose ones of "B1", and the harshest ones of "B3" wouldn't hit as hard with a more pristine production.

Since 2013, there haven't been much developments around the collective. An almost decade long lack of releases from everyone we know was involved. Until now.

This has been yours truly's 750th review.