Folklore by The Blood Mountain Black Metal Choir

Appalachian black metal is a genre near and dear to my heart. When I was a kid and my family moved from Mississippi to West Virginia, I was totally ignorant to the region’s dark and bloody history of militant labor organizing, indigenous genocide, or the addiction crisis that, even then, was strengthening it’s grip on the new community in which I found myself. But these are the stories at the center of The Blood Mountain Black Metal Choir’s first release, Folklore. Blending folk legend and real history, Folklore shrouds in mythic imagery tales of violent worker exploitation met with unflinching bloodshed in return. But, this anonymous one man band asks, what is the victory worth, when the prize is the destruction of your homeland, stripping the forests and forever poisoning the lakes with coal tar? As soaring, triumphant melodies fragment into dissonant chaos, each track embodies a uniquely Appalachian approach to raw black metal. As noted by another listener’s Bandcamp comment on the album, compared to the banal anti-authoritarianism for which the old school European black metal bands rallied, this homegrown demo targets truly oppressive structures like capitalism, colonialism, and consumerist Christianity. On the surface, the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains remains awe-inspiring in their age and majesty, but the sins of the father cast a dark ancestral shadow with a crushing weight too heavy to ignore.