Black metal has an identity problem, and it’s exhausting.  The community froths at the mouth to validate, accuse, hoist aloft or otherwise dismantle what it means to be black metal in the current age.  But then I look at the rolling fields and crumbling ruins in broad daylight that note the arrival of a new Obsequiae record and I breathe a sigh of relief.  Here is a band unconcerned with status, with genre, with any kind of presence (seriously, beyond a Metal Archives listing I couldn’t find anything) in the community other than to carry high the singular sound they’ve been refining for three albums now.  And now the consumer of music can turn from the maelstrom and rejoice, for The Palms of Sorrowed Kings stands as the clearest, finest example of the kind of thing Obsequiae and no one else is doing in metal right now.  Continue reading →