Description

Double album on purple vinyls with gatefold cover.

Botanist are different. When composer, lyricist, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Otrebor created the San Francisco based band in 2009, he already had a specific lyrical concept in mind that has persisted to permeate all releases until and including today. The songs of this project are told from the perspective of a protagonist called The Botanist, who is characterized as a crazed man of science that lives in self-imposed exile, as far away from Humanity and it’s crimes against Nature as possible. In his sanctuary of fantasy and wonder, which he calls The Verdant Realm, The Botanist surrounds himself with plants and flowers to find solace in the company of the Natural world, while he envisions the destruction of mankind. Botanists lyrics are equally informed by scientific nomenclature as they are inspired by Romantic-era poetry, art, and philosophy. Botanist are different also in musical terms. In a striking departure from traditional metal instrumentation, Otrebor uses distorted hammered dulcimers instead of guitars. This also makes Botanist the first band to adapt magnetic pickups to hammered dulcimer, and perform on stage. Stylistically, the Americans pay tribute to the mentality of some of the pioneering Scandinavian black metal bands connection to nature, before spinning the dark yarn into new sonic and emotional fabrics. To Botanist, the black metal trope about misanthropy and of being alone in the forest is in fact about the woods and it’s floral inhabitants themselves. Each named plant becomes it’s own character in the ever growing pantheon of the project’s green metal discography. Botanist sprouted from the seed of their debut double-album I: The Suicide Tree / II: A Rose From The Dead (2011) into a tripartite sapling with the addition of III: Doom in Bloom (2012). The music is dark, eerie, cold with some agonized vocals. All is perfectly strained with a nod to the lo-fi black metal tradition, with surprising melodies and fascinating lyrics about various flora. Botanist is definitely not for everyone and not even for everyday but they are one of the more unique black metal bands you can find

Track list:
1. Quoth Azalea, The Demon (Rhododendoom II)
2. Deathcap
3. Ganoderma Lucidum
4. Vriesea
5. Ocimum Sanctum
6. Amanita Virosa
7. Panax