Any individual that has explored the Black Metal dungeon came out craving some misanthropic dark music releases. To those adventurers, we have some nice stock in store, and let me start by presenting "An Arrow In Heart" by our fellow frenchies AOSOTH.

The French Black Metal scene has always astounded me with how amazing and uniquely dark it is. For example, we have the demons BLUT AUS NORD, and one of my all-time favorite Black Metal bands, PESTE NOIRE. So do AOSOTH stand kings among the rest of the spawn? Or do they sink in the devilish sea of audio corpses? Let's find out.

"An Arrow In Heart" first of all starts as any Black Metal album would, fast guitar riffing accompanied with some blast beats, and raw shrieks stemming from the vocalist which is supposedly covered in corpse paint and has an inverted pentagram tattooed on his left thigh... But seriously now, the album opens up very smoothly, and the non-extremely-professional production suits the sound a lot. Kind of reminiscent of some early underground DSBM, but with more DARKTHRONE and HORNA added to the mix.

What makes this album even better is the addition of clean acoustic passages, and a very dark and interesting theme, which can be seen from the literal gothic translation of the album title in the album cover. As an extra, upon finishing the first half, you'll also be greeted with some good old blasphemy in spoken passages either sampled or spoken by the band.

However, with all the positive aspects AOSOTH have on this release, it still ends up being a somewhat average Black Metal album. Sure, I'd give it another few spins, and indulge in the dark nostalgia the release gives me, but the band seems like they could have done a little better, especially on the very long tracks on the album which end up being very repetitive like the self titled track and "Ritual Marks of Penitence".

Overall, it's a very decent release for all fans of the somewhat traditional sound in Black Metal (with a sprinkle of experimentation), and AOSOTH clearly worked hard on this very inspired release. Although it deserves an average score, it definitely stood out for me among all the 2013 releases I have tried so far.