Category Archives: Black Metal

NECROS CHRISTOS (Ger): “Triune Impurity Rites” Cd 2006 Sepulchral Voice

Necros ChristosWhen I hear albums like this one, I really find it arduos to connnect. I have difficulties choosing where to start, coordinating my fiongers, trying to come up with the right words, becouse 99% of my brain just wants to sit back and listen, being dragged within the wounds of christ to drink and bathe of his pain. The room where I am typing was cold, but even colder – unnaturally so – is the miasma of Death that now fills it. Absence of life. Decomposing life. Pure necromantic spells that drain warmth and happiness.

Well first off I’d like to say that “Sepulchral Voice” is my favorite Sodom song ever – the choice of using it as a label name is brilliant (well, we’re on the lines of Deathlike Silence but when we talk about songs like those, we cannot criticize) – not much but that’s the most clever thing I can think of as of now. Do you have the idea of how fucking good this is? Seriously speaking, this music is Evil with capital “E”. I’d like to hear what politicians and religious people that found the Devil’s speech in albums by the doors or led zeppelin albums would think of something as dark as this. There is surely a lot of Celtic Frost hovering among the tracks, and a tidbit of earliest Mortuary Drape‘s theatrical evocativeness – but most of all, there is class, the class of a deranged painter covered in sperm, dried blood and drool drawing the lines of his own insanity with the colors of fucking hell. In every field real artists know how to weave a masterpiece with just a few strokes, and this album reflects this concept on music. You don’t have overly complicated guitar riffs. Actually most of them are quite simple yet arranged with such a taste and elegance that everything flows like black blood running smoothly from an altar of sacrifice* – simple fragments of dedication to the cult of evil arranged with meticolous taste. I love the vocals – the last time I heard ones so malignant was in Immolation‘s “Dawn of Possession”, but they’re just the right complement to a balanced macabre ballet of death and putrefaction. Ave to the lord of Flies, Asmodeus rex.

*Curse of the damned / Confronting the evil you dread / Coalesce into one your shadow and soul / Soon you will meet the undead

GONKULATOR (us-ma): “Second War in Heaven” Cd 2000 Fudgeworthy

GONKULATOR Second War in HeavenWhoa! Gonkulator is a band that makes Revenge sound as polished as Oasis. No kidding, I seriously doubt you can find something as filthy and unrefined as this band – it should not surprise Charlie also plays in a band generally associated to punk/grind sonorities. For unrefined I do not mean just badly recorded as in early Burzum or Striborg – as if someone poured water on the speakers – nay, that’s filthy but also weak. Gonkulator is filthy to the core, as if GG Allin tried to play Black Metal with a cheese grater. With all this shit going on, how could one not like them? You must be open to really bad production and extremely basic music writing, but I personally found this Ep entertaining. Drumming is just little more than violent beating, and the riffs just a noisy scattering of chords, but hey man, the spirit is alive here. The vocals are a bit too filtered maybe, but they just blend to perfection in the chaos vortex that crackle and fizzles all beneath. I really don’t know how much tongue-in-cheek humor there is in Gonkulator, but they’re among the coolest Black Metal bands around these days, just crazy and chaotic, and uncontrolled like the art of the Devil should be. Too bad it’s several years I don’t hear of them. The packaging is decent to my appeal, and includes a good fold out artwork by Scott Lewis. All in all super cool shit. Respect!

NOCRATAI (ita): “…Must Be Hell Living in The World…” Cd-r 2007 [demo]

nocratai.jpgThe cool guy that handed me this Cd told me – word by word – that I was not going to like this shit. Actually I don’t like it very much I admit, but there is a sense of complete despair and misanthropy lingering over these tracks which fascinate me nonetheless. Basically somewhat derivative crude Black Metal to start with, it really gets to another level when the industrial samples and loops turn in. Nocratai is able to assemble a balanced commistion of grim monochrome metal of darkness (I’d prefer to say – grayness) and cyberpunk isolationsim, skillfully drifting among the whole grey spectrum of despair, agony, inhumanity, grotesque. All in all this stuff is not only recorded surprisingly well, but I am quite impressed by how competently this shit has been made. I was expecting some amateurish tracks made up of quick Cubase loops and some of those obscene popeye vocals, but instead I have come to dig it, more and more as the demo turned towards the end – sometimes it reminded me the intricacies of Deathspell Omega or Arkhon Infaustus – yet there are no real resemblaces to these bands. Good work on the cover too, simple work but classy – if the guy is also the one doing the drawings you can color me impressed – very Mignola-esque! Real good for a genre I really marginally follow and often scoff at.

NECROS CHRISTOS (Ger): “Grave Damnation” compilation Cd 2005 Worship Him

Necros Christos - Grave DamnationNecros Christos from Berlin. A phenomenon that has exploded like a burst of flames straight from Hell taking everyone by surprise, cabonizing churches and immolation priests praying for salvation. The whole underground is buzzing and murmuring on how fucking great this band is. And, well, I could not but agree with the mainstream this time. Necros Christos is really the best Death Metal band coming out of the underground in the last few years – it incarnates perfectly every parameter that makes Death Metal the sickest and darkest form of Art of all times. I cannot tell exactly HOW they do it but the band is able to recreate a kind of dark, hypnotic, demonic atmosphere which moves something inside me that was slumbering inside me since the early nineties. Influences of Hellhammer (a LOT of Hellhammer), Incantation, Imprecation, Symphony of Grief, early Samael, old Paradise Lost and some old school Finnish doom/death (and damn I can even say Disincarnate) are abundant but perfectly balanced in a strictly personal interpretation Metal of fucking Death which is equally obscure and spiritually powerful. This is a band which is 280 times more Black than your average Norwegian penguin. Everything is stripped to the bone, leaving only no nonsense quality music. The vocals are deep and demonical, reverberating as if they were coming from beyond the grave, the guitars deep and grating, slowly evocative of images of gothic damnation. There is really something infernal going on here, haven’t heard this kind of feeling since Immolation‘s “Dawn of Possession”.

Worship Him records re-released this third Necros Christos demo “Grave Damnation” in Cd format – which is a bit disappointing for me since this is the only one I already had in tape, but whatever, anything from this band seems to be sold out nowadays so it is a great buy for people looking for anything by the band. The packaging is superb and everything again just falls in its place in this grand design of blasphemic necromanic Death Metal . A great Goatlord cover ends the Cd.

I am sure I have already heard something similar in style in the past but really cannot remember when… what matters anyway is that Necros Christos has a full-length album out now, so go for it as well.

GAURITHOTH (Fin): “Huoravasara” 7″ Ep 2004 Fudgeworthy

Gaurithoth - HuoravasaraFudgeworthy records from Massachusetts (label of Charlie Infection of Psycho and Gonkulator fame) released a couple black metal Eps in the past one of which being this grey marble colored 4 track by Finish band Gaurithoth. Considering the proclaims of playing extreme Satanic Latex Perverse Metal, I was expecting some fucking bomb lacerating the whole fucking house I live in. As already happened with its previous release Pest however, I admit this is really not up to my expectations. I haven’t heard the recent full length, but this demo material has two big flaws: too much melody and strident witchlike vocals. Personally I don’t even Like Grand Belial’s Key for their over excess of heavy metal harmonies, and this time the problem is similar. Mid tempo ballad-like riffs with a couple harmonic “cold” tremolo chords are not really my cup of tea when we talk about Black Metal. Some riffs are outright happy hunting choirs – brr, no thank you. The vocals are randomly scattered on the recording, with little or no punch at all, and well, they don’t even sound evil to me. The only thing I appreciate is that the recording is excellent (rough but not thin), ad the drums filthy and crude as they must be in this genre. Huoravasara contains the same tracks of their 2002 demo, plus one unreleased song cut just for the vinyl version. This stuff might appeal fans of all things called Black Metal from Finland. Since a few years however, I decided to be a little bit more selective.

MARDUK (Swe): “Dark Endless” Cd 1992 No Fashion

Naming the band after a Babylonian god and talking about blasphemy of the Judeo/Christian religion might sound a bit weird, but after all that’s the Morbid Angel way. The first thing that kicks ass in this album is the killer cover art by no one else than Dani Vala, guitarist and singer of the band I reviewed yesterday, Obscurity. Why this guy didn’t do more of these splendid works is beyond me. This painting is really “evil”, and grotesque.

Marduk - Dark EndlessSeveral of the best bands that turned into pure Black Metal in the nineties have common roots in the Death Metal scene (not that I think there is so much difference between the genres after all anyway). Marduk‘s first album “Dark Endless” has all the great elements of the classic Swedish Death Metal sound. Dan Swano did a good job at fiding the right sound for this recording – the obese trademark crushing sound of the Swedish axe permeates all songs, with a good balance of mid tempo, Bolt Thrower reminiscent riffs, hints of melodies in the vein of old Crematory, and even a sporadic use of keyboards a la Thou Shalt Suffer towards the end. While the album closes with an epic, elaborate and evocative guitarwork, the first songs, while generally faster, have their good share of sluggish, almost symphonic bridges. All of this has been obviously cooked with the classic Swedish receipt of sickness – none of this sounds mellow. My only regret is the vocals are a bit too raspy and high. I guess how killer this would have sounded with a real singer like Rogga of Merciless or a young Matti Karki. The main theme on this album could be misanthropy and obscurity, elements that were lost with time. I admit I like this stuff, but also their newer albums. This might not be an album that can be credited as legendary in the Death Metal world, but it’s a good compromise of Swedish Death Metal, crushing heaviness, misanthropy and a pinch of classic Scandinavian taste for dark melodies.

My copy, on No Fashion, has no lyrics on it, but I guess the new version has a better booklet. For sure the titles themselves follow the music perfectly: they are all about departure, funerals, damnation…

LAMENT CONFIGURATION (USA-Ga): “Demonic Incantations” Cd-r 2005 Vile Art

LAMENT CONFIGURATIONReviewing a band after seeing Grotesque in concert is something quite painful to stand, especially when a band is so full to the brim of clichès and devoid of personality as this one. This is the kind of sad ballad Black Metal a la Burzum out of ideas. Musically this is nothing but of shit. One million kilos of reverb, which might as well hide Dream Theater beneath this veil of filth. Nothing wrong with it, so far so good if they leave the moaning continuously vibrating all the time. What kills everything here is that couple of happy, sing along rock and roll riffs which just fit the distant vocals like a dick in the pea soup. There is little to pity in this shit. If Black Metal is surely more about misanthropy and atmospheres, this fails tragically. There is a thin veil between dismal simplicity and being incompetent. This shit band stands right in the second field. The cover is standard greyscale with gothic fonts and stuff but well, this might as well be the case with this genre.