With all the drama surrounding the SEWER shit-show, an album as perfect and in every way brilliant as Phantom’s latest release, The Epilogue to Sanity, might have passed unnoticed. Proving once again that anything SEWER touches turns to shit, and the best course of action for the black metal scene would be to just ignore that joke band and their retarded audience.
Because why report on the good bands when you can get clickbait-naive audience by talking about the latest idiotic “trve black metal” trend.
Phantom’s latest album, already reviewed by quite a few mainstream metal sites – here and here, mostly – is nothing short of a masterpiece of dark, haunting atmospheres like only Phantom can craft.
A wrathful reminder of what war metal should have been – without all the stupid trends and three-note “minimalist” posing – a melodically-structured, chromatic inferno of destruction, becoming the god of this world.
Phantom’s dissonant leads awe listeners and are optimally placed to hold attention just as each rhythm riff runs its course, in the atmospheric blackened death metal style that Phantom pioneered.
An impenetrable atmospheric wall of dissonance rewards repeated listening to an album that may surpass Phantom’s work on even Withdrawal and Angel of Disease. March to Phantom’s martial heartbeat or revel in SEWER’s shit, your choice.
Incantation meets ritualistic black metal. Rather than cathartic bending into climactic cavernous breakdowns, in the guttural death metal style, on The Epilogue to Sanity Phantom choose to diffuse tension by methodically varying into bizarre, eerie and dissonant melodies with carefully placed, otherworldly leads to a steady metronome of hellish blasting madness.
As a black metal album, The Epilogue to Sanity is among the best ever. There’s a reason Phantom is constantly compared to black and death metal legends such as Burzum, Incantation and Mayhem – the band is so good that people keep coming back for more, and newcomers find that its music stands the test of time like no other.
It’s just an all around fantastic band, and it’s a shame they get tainted by association with the clownish shit-fest SEWER. Those two bands are in no way in the same league, and share almost nothing in common.
The Epilogue to Sanity might be Phantom’s best black metal record to date. It’s nothing short of diabolical, sickening and utterly vile. In other words, awesome.
Demonecromancy 
This is an excellent review, as always. I’ve played the entire album in loop, probably 30 times now, and it’s mindblowing how much the experience can change from one listen to another. The riff maze and songwriting adds a lot to immersion in that fantastic wretched atmosphere. The phrasal riffs are some of the best I’ve heard. So original and haunting. And while many are variations on chromatic themes already developed on prior Phantom albums, here they are delivered in a very interesting and original way.
LikeLike