Negura Bunget Focul Viu

In The Cave of the Living Fire (Focal Viu), in north-western Romania, the interplay of filtered sunlight on the vaporous sheen of an underground glacier creates a subterranean lightshow. 

It’s phenomena like this, which straddle the border between the natural and the supernatural, that lie at the heart of Negura Bunget’s music, itself a fusion of folk and black metal, rooted in the spiritual traditions of their native Transylvania.

The lyrics (which are sung in Romanian) are glorifications of the wilderness, full of brutal pagan imagery - “wood straightened by fire,” roaming packs of wolves, rolling fog, dense coniferous forests, desolate mountain ranges, and the overlaying strata of successive mythologies laid down by generations of human inhabitants. The music with its abrupt shifts in tone, tempo and instrumentation, ranging from trembling acoustics to full metal onslaught, is a sonic approximation of the landscape that inspired it.

This two disc live album sees the band on intense form, well-rehearsed and tuned into each other. A highpoint - Cel Din Urma Vis (one of many songs in the set taken from the 2006 album - OM) - aptly illustrates the complexity of their music, opening with a circular guitar figure, a second guitarist adding glacial impressionistic detail, while the drummer briefly breaks rank to gallop ahead, before falling back in step. Minutes later the band are sucked into a howling black hole of strobed beats and then abruptly ejected into a twilight zone of spacey almost celestial calm before the song slowly builds towards a climax, in which Hupogrammos’ feral vocals are joined by acoustic guitar player and backing singer, Corb, who, if anything, sounds even more bestial. It’s in this final minute that the music fulfils the seldom achieved remit of the live album - transmitting the energy of a performance through space and time to the ears of a distant listener, via a pair of headphones or speakers.

Not everything survives the transition from studio to stage quite so well. Three tracks from 'N Crugu Bradului (a 2002 concept album featuring a quartet of songs, each representing one of the four seasons) are presented in truncated form. II and III suffer from being smooshed together and dispatched within 16 minutes - just over half the collective running time of their studio counterparts. There’s little fault in the performance itself, but if ever there were songs that needed space to breathe and develop it was these. IIII is similarly abridged, losing the churning ambient atmospherics that brought to mind swirling drifts of powdered snow, being turned over by a biting arctic wind on a desolate tundra, The ferocious kernel of black metal at the song’s heart remains, but the doomy keyboards and the haunted house thermin effect that provided the gothic centrepiece sound weedier and less majestic than on record.

Another criticism unrelated to the performance itself lies in the sequencing of the album. The first five minutes of the show, in which hunters horns diffuse into a wash of keyboards, is wasted when the spell is broken by a split-second gap between the first and the second track, when there isn’t any obvious reason why the two shouldn’t flow seamlessly together.

Negura Bunget have long understood the value of quality packaging as a frame for their music. A limited edition of last year’s studio album Vîrstele Pamîntului came in a handmade, rope-burned wooden box containing a sample of Transylvanian soil, while early copies of 'N Crugu Bradului  included a clipping from a coniferous forest.   

Focul Viu is presented in a cut-down hardback book decorated with some wonderfully creepy black and red artwork that mirrors the music within. A rather expensive box set, which includes a DVD of the performance is also available. Like all live albums this one is targeted at fans, its release most likely intended as the last word from founding member and former lead vocalist Hupogrammos. Newcomers to the group or to the genre would be better served by seeking out OM or 'N Crugu Bradului, both of which are difficult but rewarding records.