Mysterious tyrants - A review of Барон Унгерн's Grandkhaan

It's difficult to say whether this band actually existed or whether it's a hoax. A few years ago, there were rumours about a brutal death metal band from North Korea that obviously turned out to be a joke. Baron Ungern's story features a few odd similarities. This here is an extended play released in 2016 that supposedly features two grim and frostbitten black metal tracks recorded back in 1999. The group claims to be Mongolia's first black metal band but even twenty years later, a metal scene is practically nonexistent in that country. The band was apparently a trio but no names of the members were ever revealed and no band photos seem to exist either. The group apparently comes from a Mongolian town named Kharkhorin in the middle of the steppes with a population just under ten thousand people. One has to wonder how black metal found its way to such a remote place about two decades ago.

The mysterious vibe around the band is accentuated by a cover artwork based around Mongolian symbols and a reference to Baron Roman Fyodorovich Ungern-Sternberg, an arch-conservative monarchist from the Austro-Hungarian Empire who invaded and occupied Mongolia for about five months back in 1921 and intended to fight Bolsheviks before being captured, tried and executed. Giving this release the title Grandkhaan in relation to that tyrant might be bitter sarcasm.

The music on this output is raw black metal with the most terrible production I have ever heard in my life which could be meant as a compliment since it only adds to the icy atmosphere of the source material. Everything sounds blurry and muddy as if recorded through wet cardboard in a crumbled basement. One can barely distinguish surprisingly variable drum play, sinister guitar riffs and angry vocals that could sing about anything or nothing at all in any possible language since it's impossible to make sense of it.

Despite the charismatically raw production, the songwriting seems to be quite solid. Pitiless, frosty and fast parts meet slow, meanacing and atmospheric passages which are connected quite coherently. Despite impressive running times, the two tracks never really get boring and sound like endless maelstroms of darkness. The tracks could have more differentiated overtures and codas but everything else sounds quite structured.

Барон Унгерн's Grandkhaan offers grim and frostbitten black metal that oozes with atmosphere and convinces with surprisingly diversified songwriting. The mysterious story behind the band is certainly intriguing but the final result should please genre fans anyway, no matter if the band actually consisted of three Mongolians from an isolated farm town in the nineties or of three drunk teenagers from Minnesota that only got together two and a half years ago. Fans of raw black metal should certainly check this out.

Final rating: 70%