The official re-release of Beherit's The Oath Of Black Blood from Season Of Mist, presented in a digipack with gnarly album art from Chris Moyen.

Now, here's some really filthy black metal. A volatile force in early 90's black metal, Beherit hailed from Finland and made quite an impression on black metal fans with their first CD release Oath Of Black Blood, released in 1992. Their brand of black metal was seriously raw and noisy, recorded so low-fi that there's a constant noxious tape hiss that seeps between the cracks of their music, and the playing is so chaotic to the point where Beherit's guitar riffs and uber-sloppy blastbeat drumming and psychotic vocals constantly falls in and out of synch with one another, creating an intensely feral sound heavily influenced by early grindcore and death metal as well as early Sarcofago. Later albums would explore more ambient, experimental territory, but Beherit's earliest tracks are toxic flashpoints of vileness that rank as some of the most crazed, fucked-up black metal from that era. These guys channeled pure evil through their chaotic, eccentric chainsaw guitar riffing, relentless neanderthal blastbeat drumming, but it's frontman Holocausto and his whacked out vocals that especially burn my nerve endings; throughout these short, barbaric eruptions of black metal, Holocausto spews a stream of bizarre croaking, demonic whispers, blasphemous hissing, sickening vomit sounds, and trippy processed moaning that sound totally fucking inhuman. It's so "out" and freakish that the music almost borders on Abruptum territory with all of the eerie synthesizers, tribal drums, noises, effects and brief ambient outros that appear all over these songs, though Beherit indeed played "songs" with real riffs and a semblence of structure, in spite of how noisy and extreme this stuff gets. And there are times when Beherit does devolve into a black miasma of turbulent distortion and percussion, mainly towards the ends of songs like "Beast Of Damnation" and "Demonomancy", the simplistic riffing and blasting drums melting together into a viscous blob of hellish violence. If you can't get enough of the more violent, fucked-up and noisy fringes of black metal, bands like Vargr, Ash Pool, Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Nekrasov, Abruptum, Von, Blasphemy, etc., then you really need to go back to Beherit, who were one of the first bands to deliver black metal at it's most primal, it's most insane and chaotic state.