Canticum Diaboli will release Compendium Horribilis on 11 November through Ad Noctem Records, on CD and digitally. The title is Latin for a horrible collection, and the record is exactly that: eight stories, all of them Italian, none of them invented.
The list is the selling point. Giordano Bruno, burned in Rome in 1600 for what he thought. The vampire legends of Venice. The Sack of Rome in 1527. The putridarium, the practice of letting the dead decompose seated before the bones were cleaned and stored. And the Monster of Ravenna, the portent whose description survives in sixteenth century pamphlets and which supplied the cover.
Black metal usually reaches for Scandinavia or for invented antiquity. A band from the Veneto going through its own country's archives instead ends up with material no Norwegian band can use, and with a record that is at least about something.
Two albums since 2014 makes this their third full length, on a label at home with exactly this kind of thing. Eleven November, and the artwork is the monster.