Hidden Tribe proudly presents VITAL SPIRIT's highly anticipated debut album, Still as the Night, Cold as the Wind. Self-described as “Saccharine Black Metal of the West,” VITAL SPIRIT began in 2020 as a collaboration between Kyle Tavares (Seer, Wormwitch) and Israel Langlais (Wormwitch). Eager to return to the studio after completing their EP In the Faith That Looks Through Death, the band wrote and recorded their full length during the spring of 2021.
Still as the Night, Cold as the Wind displays the array of VITAL SPIRIT's mesmerizing vision. In addition to the familiar second wave black metal and cinematic western influences of the preceding EP, the duo incorporated elements of "cowboy psychedelia" of the '60s, resulting in a sound that's dazzling and daring in equal measure, both acutely focused and furiously unbound. With preternatural deftness, VITAL SPIRIT here also leaned into their neofolk side, especially on "Saccharine Sky," the band’s first fully non-metal track to date. Equally vital to VITAL SPIRIT's vision is their lyrical content, which here covers the American Indian wars of the Southwest, spanning over a hundred years from the mid-18th century to the late 19th century.
Pre-order cassette:
https://www.hiddentribe.ca/store/p/vital-spirit-still-as-the-night-cold-as-the-wind-cassette-pre-order
Pre-order digital:
https://vitalspirit.bandcamp.com/album/still-as-the-night-cold-as-the-wind
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Video by Lucien Xavier Cyr
Lyrics:
It grows as it goes
Through struggle and toil
Invaded, unconquered
Foreign boots upon the soil
Revolt in Santa Fe
To arise on Christmas Day
Smothered at its birth
The Ancients rise again
Gray Eminence of Taos
Stoking flames of dissent
Ceding land, reaping hatred
Sickness unto death
To the home of the gringo
In the dark before sunrise
Flinging arrows to rout them
Clawing the walls to survive
With lightning in their veins
War chants on liquored tongues
Shot, stabbed, and pierced
Bent’s scalp baking in the sun
Los diablos Americanos
Struck in swift reprisal
Pursued from hilltop to hilltop
To the pueblo at red willows
The citadel besieged
Raining hellfire and damnation
Bursting shells, shrieking wounded
Little quarter asked or given
A drumhead court-martial
In the wake of devastation
From a cottonwood in Taos
The conquered hung for treason
If an injury must be done
Let it be so severe
That with the passage of time
Vengeance need not be feared
