Album Details

• Artist: Glorior Belli
• Album: Meet Us At The Southern Sign
• Label: Candlelight
• Year of Release: 2009
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: solitaryman on 2011-09-27

After spending a considerable amount of time and effort crafting the sinsister Manifesting The Raging Beast for Southern Lord records, France's Glorior Belli jumped ship to the (more fitting, if you ask me) services of Candlelight, and dug in to attempt to further their innovative blend of 2nd-era black metal with tones and trends of the influential American southern rock/metal scene. Meet Us At The Southern Sign is, in comparison, a much more diverse and tempting beast.

"Once In A Blood Red Moon" is a quality opener, reintroducing the listener to the basic tenements of the band's sound in impacting fashion. The guitar work seems to have taken a big step forward right off the bat, and the mid-paced chug is a perfect way to ease you in before "The Forbidden Words" multiplies the speed factor and kicks things into high gear. The vocals are throat-wrenching, painful to the ears in a way only your more extreme genres of metal can pull off while still being appropriate and, furthermore, enjoyable in context. "Swamp That Shame" shows, in a very big way, how far Glorior Belli have come from their beginnings, a wonderfully written track that sucks you in with a sticky dual-layered hypno-riff/hook combination. It may only be an instrumental, but damn does it work. After the monstrously doom-laden "There Is Only One Light", I'm already seeing that the band is much more comfortable at a slower, more deliberate pace, where the crushing atmosphere of their sound can truly flesh itself out and acts at it's most effective. And so the album goes, running that gamut between optimization In Every Grief-Stricken Blues, The Blazing Darkness (Of Luciferian Skies)) and creative branching-out of sorts (My True Essence). There is a little bit of a lull in the back half that makes the already epic title track seem that much more of a hit. But it really is quite enjoyable. 

My biggest hope for the band was to evolve more varied songwriting techniques after Manifesting, and while I'm not sure I got my wish, I find it so much less important after hearing Meet Us At The Southern Sign. Glorior Belli have developed a sound, and here you can witness them settling into it so comfortably as to negate much of the nit-picking that could be done. There's just too many fleeting moments of "that was awesome!" to even bother mentioning how the album drags at times; you're most likely not going to notice anyway.

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