Peru, the once mighty and very rich Inca empire in South America. In history a mysterious, ancient country with a highly religious culture, its people bringing ritual offerings to the all-powerful Sun god Wiraqocha.
After being invaded and plundered by the Spanish conquistadors in 1532 and later dominated by the Anglo-American empire, the supremacy of the culture was extinguished though not forgotten by its inhabitants. Crawling from this dark past, Black Angel seeks to spread its wrath with the occult ritual “From the Darkness”.

Black Angel is actually an old band in the black metal underground, being spawned from utter darkness in 1988. At that time called Abbadon, the band took four years to release its first rehearsal tape “Rey De Las Tinieblas” (1992). In 1993 the band changed its name to Black Angel and with that the band seemed to have disappeared from existence. No new material was spread over our black souls ‘till 1997, when the demo “Rites” was produced. And again it took three more years to release something new, the demo “Corpus” was produced in the year 2000. Though the black flame seems to have kept burning all the time, Black Angel had a very slow start the first twelve years of its existence.

Cause for this was mainly financial problems. When the band finally seemed to have warmed up, some bad propaganda was spread after an argument with a former band member. It didn’t cool down Black Angel though; it finally began to spread its black magic in the form of a full length album in 2002 and several splits and demos after that.

“From the Darkness” is a massive wall of simple mid tempo black metal, quite hypnotizing because of the repetition. At certain parts the tempo even falls back into an almost doomlike slow pace. “Harlots of Satan” and “Slaves of Evil” are different from this, being played a a much faster pace. Together with the guitars the screams get slightly higher which makes these songs more furious then the rest of the album. Sometimes these parts are as arousing and monotonous as if played by Von. Several times, weird chaotic guitar solo’s like on Immortals Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism or most Morbid Angel albums fill the atmosphere. The bad thing with the slower songs is that the little variation gets a bit boring; though overall the album is full with massive black metal. Mainly the above named two faster played songs are quite to my taste.