This is why I love this gig. Every month or so, I get a package of random CD promos. Sometimes I know of the bands or the label, but more often than not, it’s yet more mystery discs from the vast reaches of the metal underground. And once in awhile, you wind up with a gem.

Or, in the case of Johann Wolfgang Pozoj, a major discovery.

As with other Eastern European bands like Drudkh and Negura Bunget, Croatia’s JW Pozoj play a hypnotic, naturalistic form of black metal that also mixes in somber doom and dark ambient. It’s an experience that’s both organic and alien, raw and sumptuous – and it’s utterly mesmerizing. And where their Scandinavian black metal brethren may employ slicing tremolo riffs and strains of classical or folk music to conjure frozen Northern landscapes, Pozoj evokes a different mood altogether. These are murmurs and roars from beneath the earth, choked up through ancient soil and into the endless autumn.

Prologue “Vječno Robljem” sets the tone perfectly, with booming synths (John Carpenter or Goblin, take your pick) resounding over an ominous bassline. It’s the summoning call for the Pozoj – an ancient Slovenian word for dragon – which wakes from its slumber with a deep, gargled roar. It’s one of the most memorable metal vocals I’ve heard in ages – as peculiar and abrasive as Master’s Hammer – and incredibly versatile too, as we’ll later hear.

From “Vječno Robljem” through “Trpaš se po Mesima,” which is more than half of the running-time, Escape of Pozoj flows as one continuous experience. “Iz Grotla Života” rumbles midtone black metal riffs over a doomy bassline, then glides into rolling, tribal drums and chiming arpeggios. The pace picks up with “Untitled” and “Song of Pozoj,” as ethereal ambience gives way to a scrawl of thrashy riffs and furious drumming. And all the while, there’s that guttural, unearthly vocal, like a primeval spirit calling from somewhere deep within the forest.

Then, with “Careless are Your Souls” and its epic follow-up “Forest,” a break. A slower, more wandering pace, with a pulsing bassline that lulls you for the grand entrance of JW Pozoj’s clean vocals. These are spoken word in a distinctive Eastern European dialect, all trilled consonants and lilting musicality – which makes it all the more striking when the death-gargle comes roaring back. And there’s one more voice yet to come – a sonorous croon on the album’s magisterial closer, “Prstima Prelazim Preko Tvoga Tijela”.

Johann Wolfgang Pozoj (which is a band, by the way, and not a solo project) is one of the most unique and honest black metal acts that I’ve heard in a long time. I’d put these guys up there with Enslaved, classic Tiamat and Negura Bunget as masters of evocative, artful metal, and I’d rank Escape of Pozoj alongside modern classics like Om, Dead As Dreams or Blood in Our Wells. There’s no gimmickry here, no artifice. No ostentatious symphonics or cartoonish posturing. This is the real fucking deal.

[Visit the band's website]

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