Nargaroth - Unity (Rasluka Part I + Rasluka Part Ii)

Facts René "Ash" Wagner has driven Nargaroth as a singular vision since 1996, working out of Saxony, Germany, within the raw, uncompromising tradition of German black metal. Across three decades the project has cycled through eras without ever settling, and these two EPs, recorded in the same session as Geliebte des Regens, belong to that same classic-era stretch of the catalogue. Rasluka Part II arrived in 2002, Part I followed in 2004 after it's own planned release fell through, and only in 2010 did the two finally appear together the way Wagner had intended from the start, a mourning-driven pair united as one record rather than left as scattered fragments. Both EPs are dedicated to a former bandmate who died by suicide in 1995, and that loss sits at the centre of everything here, plainly and without embellishment. Part I is the angrier of the two, guitars and vocals pushed into a more open, hateful mix; Part II slows into something more melodic, closer to a pagan kind of desolation. The instrumentals were tracked in a single 2001 session, vocals added separately over the following years, and the gap between recording and completion shows in how deliberately each half is paced against the other.