Finland has given us plenty of fucked up black metal bands; Beherit, Impaled Nazarene, Clandestine Blaze, Wyrd, and Trollheim's Grott all spring to mind. It seems to me that the Finnish metal scene is a fertile environment for weird, punky blackness in particular, but while the debut album from Aanal Beehemoth straddles both the blasted catharsis of punk and the negation and atavism of black metal, Forest Paranoid is in it's own weird world, a freakish splooge of psychedelic necropunk that drips filth and junkie sweat from their reverb-soaked jams.

The whole album is whacked out, from the photos of members Deathly Fightor and Crazy Bomber in over-the-top corpse paint and their faces contorted into gruesome kabuki-like grimaces, smoking joints and shooting junk, to their band name (what the fuck does Aanal Beehemoth even mean?), but it's their music that is really frying my brain. A grotty sort of garage punk, fast and loose and catchy as hell, but filtered through utterly weirdo black metal with the vocals jammed through a bunch of trippy effects. Take a look at the influences that the band lists on their MySpace page - Hellhammer, early 80's Finnish punks Kaaos, the outsider garage rock of The Shaggs, Gism, Elvis, and Black Flag...that might give you an idea of what's festering on this album.

The album was recorded on a 4-track, and the raw production fits these damaged blackpunk anthems perfectly; it feels like yer hearing the band jamming at full force down in some slime-covered dungeon, grinding out their three minute buzzsaw anthems in abandon, slinging crazy acid-guitar solos, dreamy organ freakouts that sound like the band dragged a beat up old Hammond into the middle of their cave, mutant blasts of ghostly ambience and electronic effects, and best of all, surprising bits of pretty psychedelic melody and trippy guitar lines that show up in almost every song. Imagine if you took a primal 60's garage punk outfit like the Stooges, or the Sonics, or the MC5, ripped them out of their timeline and transported them to a snowy Scandanavian forest circa now, and left 'em to their own devices with only a crate of Kossu and copies of

Darkthrone's Plaguewielder, GISM's Detestation and Celtic Frost's Morbid Angels to guide them through the void. It fits right in on Suffering Jesus alongside the psychedelic 70's rock/black metal of Tjolgtjar, but where Tjolgtjar is deadly serious with his weirdo occultic themes and wonky black-acid-metal, the tongues of the Aanal Beehemoth is firmly planted in it's collective cheek, as evidenced by songs like "From Aanal With Love" and "Loaded Head Empty Veins". Regardless, this freaking rocks.