Cromworx – Cromworx
Cromworx – Cromworx
Northern Silence Productions
Release Date: 03/02/23
Running Time: 50:00
Review by Dark Juan
7/10
Good afternoon, my legions. I trust you are all hale and hearty and doing everything you can to further the wealth of your state with the hard-working sweat of your brow and making sure you enrich the elite. Know your place and do the work. You earn what you deserve. Or you could rise up against the financial tyranny of your elites and your government, and take back the means of production, because it is you who own it. You are governed with your own consent and your consent can be removed at any time. RISE UP! Take back your lands and depose the twisted, inhuman demons in suits worth more than your old car. Put them to the sword (metaphorically speaking, of course. You can’t go around maiming people. It’s ILLEGAL) and govern yourselves. It is the only way. Remove the elites and replace them with the working people. There’s nothing as expensive as being poor.
Sorry. Got carried away again. Inequality sucks and it is a disgrace that in a first-world country that there are homeless and helpless people not receiving help. It annoys me.
Now that’s off my chest, I am writing this in the Centre for Folklore, Myth and Magic in Todmorden, where Mrs Dark Juan and I are volunteers as well as members. Mrs Dark Juan is making a sign for the Centre, which is a welcome relief from the eldritch terrors she normally creates at home. I am therefore, because I have done the manual labour I was brought here for, now ensconced in the corner after having a double espresso. This was a very bad idea because I am hypersensitive to caffeine and it sets me off babbling and trembling. Mrs Dark Juan once snuck a double espresso into my mocha when we lived in Wales. She did not enjoy (after the initial gigglesome episodes about food as we were at a food fair) the three hours of very loud and very fast lecturing about the Hawker Tempest and the Napier Sabre engine it was powered by and how it turned into the Hawker Sea Fury when the engine was replaced by the Bristol Centaurus radial engine.
So, after digressing yet again – I am listening to a form of music that is closely related to Metal but isn’t. I am spinning the mediaeval Dungeon Synth sounds of Slovakian origin of Cromworx. In the interests of full disclosure, I only chose this record to review because Cromworx is a fucking AWESOME name for a band.
You know the keyboard breaks in the middle of Cradle Of Filth songs and the little vignettes they put between songs? Imagine those little Gothic masterpieces with added folky bits and intermezzos and you have an idea what Dungeon Synth sounds like. It’s like the music that the bands with lutes and fiddles and horns and shit were always playing at a feast or a revel that King Arthur was at with his knights. It is the music of heavily armed and armoured men on the backs of destriers and chargers, racing into combat with a steel-clad mass of men on a slippery battlefield, where corpses and the wounded and fallen are trampled and welters of blood are spilled as broadsword, lance and sabre punch into flesh at the joints of armour plate or lances puncture through weak spots on breastplates, where babies are impaled on pikes and waved like grisly battle standards… But with electronics rather than lute and fiddle and bodhran.
This album is interesting because they are the songs from the original Cromworx set and remained untouched for 22 years. They were authentically recorded only in 2022, on a keyboard with a 1.44″ floppy disc mechanism and no professional production in any studio. Apart from minor rearrangements and a few added vocals, the songs remain in their original form. Which means, technologically speaking, they are from the fucking Dark Ages. The record is a real time capsule, and the recordings are of surprisingly superior quality considering they have been sitting on physical media for 22 years without having seen the light of day.
The music unsurprisingly has a very cinematic quality about it. The album could easily be a soundtrack album to a sword, sorcery and sandals movie where your bronzed, heavily muscled hero swordsman (in the tone of fantasy novels – “A giant of a man with bulging thews and a square-cut black mane, his face rigid with a tight-jawed rictus grin as his blade, the mighty Bonecarver, hews through the torso of the guardsman in front of him in a welter of blood and entrails, the entreaties of the woman he has come to rescue ringing in his head. He has seen her, a slim yet statuesque young woman, one step away from a girl, surprisingly full-breasted, clad only in the diaphanous silk of the gown she was taken in. Her hair is of spun gold, cascading down her elegant, alabaster shoulders and framing the delicate oval of her face, bringing out the carmine of her full, red lips. The scent of her still resplendent in his nostrils as he carves his heroic way up the tower to the chamber in which she is imprisoned…”) slaughters his way through hordes of orcs or nasty pasties in order to take kingdoms or rescue helpless maidens who inevitably are no longer maidens within ten pages of being rescued by said swordsman, who promptly wielded a totally different kind of sword after rescuing the lady, and hasn’t given two shits about her virtue that HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PROTECTING. Also, and this might just be a product of the writers’ fevered imaginations, but have you noticed in fantasy and sword and sorcery novels, quite a lot of the supposed love scenes are perilously close to rape and sexual assault?
Fucking hell, I need to lay off the coffee. I am out of control.
In an effort to drag myself back to reality and to no longer think of slim, full-breasted ladies whose ample chests heave like a sack full of puppies at the slightest thought of a virile adventurer of the court in skin-clinging silk gowns and plunging necklines exposing the creaminess of their skin, Cromworx (being the work of Crom, keyboard batterer for Orkrist in his day job) has created an album that is varied and captivating, with beautiful melodies and sophisticated compositions that remind the listener of bygone times as well as fantasy settings and role-playing game soundtracks – it is an absolute must-have for fans of Fief and Pazuzu and the like. As for whether, because Ever Metal is after all a Metal website, our readers and fans might dig it… I’m not sure. There is nothing even resembling Metal (the closest we come to Metal is on ‘Kingdom Of Filth’ and that is because of the guttural vocal) on offer here. However, lots of the Metal community are LARPers, or tabletop gamers, or role players and this would be a fine album to add ambience to your activities, especially if you’re doing a full-on D&D campaign or playing Warhammer or something like that.
Which leads me to the demerits. The main one is obviously the incredibly limited audience this record will find (it’s reminiscent of the same problem Mortiis had when he re-released his very early recordings and I can’t see Cromworx having as many completists as Mortiis does in his fanbase) because the music is just so bloody personal to Crom and so idiosyncratic and, although Dungeon Synth isn’t that unusual, mediaeval stuff is and that will further reduce the audience for what is actually a pretty damned cool album. But you HAVE to be into this sort of thing. A casual checking out of the music would have you hammering the fast-forward button in moments, I feel. Which is a shame because it is dark and moody and more than a little magnificent music that deserves more attention than it is going to get from the masses.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (Patentovaný systém hodnotenia striekania krvi Dark Juan) awards Cromworx 7/10. Marks are deducted for the following reasons – The music isn’t Metal although the themes behind it are Metal as fuck, it is a deeply unusual recording that hardly anyone will notice or understand, and, although it is total value for money, the record feels overlong at 21 pieces of music. Hence, 7/10, although I actually really like the album but I’m into strange stuff.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Prologue
02. Unnamed Themes (Part I)
03. Das Opfer Deiner Finsternis
04. Intermezzo I
05. The Curse of Averon
06. Intermezzo II
07. Sea, Wind and the Moonlight Chant
08. Unnamed Themes (Part II)
09. Intermezzo III
10. Phantasmarch
11. The Darf-men Song
12. Unnamed Themes (Part III)
13. Intermezzo IV
14. Drommefanger II (A Tribute to Forlorn)
15. Intermezzo V
16. Horns are calling (Electrospective)
17. Kingdom of Filth
18. Intermezzo VI
19. The Dragon´s Lair (A Tribute to Pazuzu)
20. Intermezzo VII
21. Epilogue
LINE-UP:
Crom – composition, keyboards, vocals & programming
Lhydia – guest vocals in ‘The Curse of Averon’
LINKS:
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