If the public is to be believed, vast numbers of people come to music as a means of escape from everyday life’s pressures and demands. It’s a mode of transport, a ticket to ride to an elsewhere of pleasure and consolation. Crossing the titular “bridge” into the music on this new LP from LVTHN won’t lift you into any sublime atmospheres, blithely removed from struggle and strife. Quite the opposite: the Belgian band plays a kind of black metal well fitted to the textures and intensities of walking around the post-industrial West in 2025. Filthy, excoriating, ill intended — the music on The Devil’s Bridge is thrilling and unpleasant in equal measure. It’s not an easily consumable bit of contemporary content. But indirectly, The Devil’s Bridge raises some interesting questions, among them: In the face of so much evil, how should art respond?
If the dudes (mostly, not exclusively, but mostly) who make trve kvlt black metal are to be believed, self-regarding contempt for popular public standards of pleasurable art is as compulsory as knowing how to work a tremolo chord. The most irritating of those dudes profess membership in an “aristocracy” (an unhappy word some black metal bands and listeners have fixed upon) of putatively “elevated” knowledge and sensibility, and the humans around them who linger in various forms of ignorance or cultural peasanthood deserve their fates. Whatever.
LVTHN may not share those reactionary attitudes, but it should be noted that the first two tracks on The Devil’s Bridge constitute a song suite, “A Malignant Encounter,” subsections of which are titled “The Servant” and “The Master.” This reviewer would like to associate the titular “malignancy” with the exploitative politics implied by those social roles — but who knows. It could be another conventional (and sort of exhausted) revisiting of fealty to Satan. For sure, principal influences on LVTHN’s sound are or were deeply traditional in their attachment to continental and Scandi Satanic black metal: Katharsis, Craft and Aosoth loom large in LVTHN’s tones and rhythms.
Aesthetically that’s good news (and additionally it’s hard to summon a more righteous trajectory through black metal and work in the social world than the one executed by Katharsis’s Drakh, AKA Dr Axel Salkheiser, a researcher at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena). The best songs on The Devil’s Bridge, “Sum Quod Eris” and “Grim Vengeance,” are muscular and direct, more raw and dirty than angular or icy. The degree of Satanic fanaticism informing the ostensible cruelty, and the precise ways that Satanism might issue in a more worldly politics, wending its way toward us through the songs — these things are unclear. The Devil’s Bridge comprises 44 minutes of compelling black metal, but it’s hard to say where it’s going. Perhaps in this sense, more than any other, that makes it hard music for hard times. Welcome to them.
Devils bridge, or Die Rakotzbrück, as it’s known locally, is located in Azalea and Rhodondendron Park Kromlau and was built over 150 years ago – in 1860. The bridge was designed using a unique construction accuracy that causes the bridge and its reflection to merge into a perfect circle when reflected in the waters beneath it, no matter what angle you look at it from. At the time we visited, the lake has been dried out as the bridge is undergoing renovation.
There is this place in Ardèche, it is highly touristic in the summer and until recently I never visited. It is called Le Pont Du Diable, The Devil’s Bridge and it is in the nice village of Thueyts.
I don’t really know why it’s called like that. They say the devil lives under the bridge but I haven’t seen him so that might just be a rumor.
As you can see, there is not a lot of tourist in november, wich is kinda sad because I believe it is quit a romantic place to walk around in this season.
The Devil’s Bridge in Wales is three bridges coexisting, each built over the older bridge. The iron bridge of 1901 is built over a stone bridge of 1753 is built over the original bridge built between 1075-1200. The bridge spans a ravine where the River Mynach drops 90 meters. There is a set of stone steps leading to the lowest bridge called Jacob’s Ladder. The original bridge was purportedly built by the devil in exchange for the first soul to cross it. An old woman cleverly threw bread onto the bridge, so the first soul was a dog’s, thus the devil was tricked.
The Devil's Bridge in Kirkby Lonsdale was supposedly built by the devil who appeared as an old woman and offered to build the bridge in exchange for the first soul to cross it. The story goes that after the bridge was built a clever woman threw bread onto the bridge and a dog ran after it. The devil only got a dog's soul for her troubles.. There are several great stones in the area, including the Great Stone of Fourstones, which are explained by the devil's purse strings having broken and the stones burst out when she was carrying them to build the bridge. The bridge was most likely built by the monks of St. Mary's Abbey, York. It has been closed to vehicles since 1932.
The Devil's Bridge in Wales is three bridges coexisting, each built over the older bridge. The iron bridge of 1901 is built over a stone bridge of 1753 is built over the original bridge built between 1075-1200. The bridge spans a ravine where the River Mynach drops 90 meters. There is a set of stone steps leading to the lowest bridge called Jacob's Ladder. The original bridge was purportedly built by the devil in exchange for the first soul to cross it. An old woman cleverly threw bread onto the bridge, so the first soul was a dog's, thus the devil was tricked.
