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ARALLU  The Demon From The Ancient World  CD   (Epidemie)   9.98


Epidemie bring us another warped individualistic metal album that reminds me why this is fast becoming one of my favorite labels. The Demon From The Ancient World is the fourth album from Arallu, an Israeli black metal band that calls themselves "barbaric Mesopotamian black metal", but this isn't a mere clone of the more well known Middle Eastern black metal band Melechesh like you might expect. While both bands draw from Middle Eastern mythology and traditional Arabic sounds that they incorporate into their music, Arallu are actually substantially more fucked up sounding than Melechesh have ever been. Whether that's due to Arallu suffering from genuine ineptitude or a refusal to play by the book when it comes to things like "rhythm" or "tightness" is still up in the air; it doesn't even matter, because this album fucking SHREDS. It's a mutant blackthrash attack that sounds like a mix of classic thrash like Slayer, Kreator and Sodom mixed with hyperspeed black metal and bona fide Arabic instruments and musical scales, but played so off-the-cuff and raggedly and with bizarre changes in speed, song structure and key that this comes close to the mutant BM realm inhabited by the likes of Furze and Benighted Leams. Arallu is fronted by vocalist and bassist Butchered, who for a very short while actually played in Melechesh, and his choked, froglike vocals spin all kinds of visions of desert-roaming demons, genii, gateways to hell opening right in downtown Jerusalem, and more earthbound matters like the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The music, as I mentioned, totally shreds; thrash metal riffs and buzzsaw blackened tremelo blurr alternate over an awesome stumbling drummer that barely stays in time with the riffs, but the way that the members of Arallu pull it off, the sloppiness and chaotic playing elevates their Arabic blackthrash onto a new level of weirdness. And then every couple of measures or so, the metal instrumentation will be suddenly joined by a host of Arabic desert instruments like darbuka and shofar, sometimes taking over completely as a song turns into a Middle Eastern tribal jam. Yeah, this album is heavy on the what-the-fuck factor, but it also rocks, and heavily at that. Songs like 'The Seven Chosen Genii' veer into ripping black n' roll, singer Butchered busts out a couple of hair-raising Tom Araya style screams, and album closer 'Tzvaot ARALLU' sounds, bizarrely enough, like a Stiff Little Fingers song as played by a diseased black metal outfit. And it rules. Hands down the best freakoid blackthrash album on Epidemie, totally recommended.


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