The word was out early in the year about this odd pairing of Revenge/Axis Of Advance members C. Ross and James Read (also of the mighty Kerasphorus and Cremation) and singer A.A. Nemtheanga from Celtic black/folk metallers Primordial, and when the advance Mp3 from their recording hit the 'net, it left a lot of baffled looks on the extreme metal message board community. It was a little hard to imagine what a band would sound like with those war metal vets fronted by Nemtheanga dramatic vocal presence, and the preliminary taste of Indoctrine suggested something quite unlike anything that we'd heard from any of their other bands. After finally getting the debut album from Blood Revolt and listening to it from start to finish, it's still a somewhat jarring and difficult listen, but I've also thoroughly come to love this disc, 'cuz it's one of the most original and powerful black metal albums that I've heard all year.

There's alot about Indoctrine that makes it stand out. The first thing that strikes the listener is the strange juxtaposition of Nemtheanga's clear, declaratory voice and lunatic delivery with the bestial, schizophrenic metal that Read and Ross unleash. And the music is fucking ferocious, clearly rooted in the supreme Canadian black/war metal violence of their other bands, with Read blasting and hammering his drum kit like a coked-up gorilla, his trademark style of somewhat sloppy, utterly vicious drumming injecting a nuclear black energy into the brutal thrash riffs and maniac black/death metal. At the same time, the band throws in some additional elements like pounding D-beat crust, the creeping, foul doom of "My Name In Blood Across The Sky", and even some surprisingly catchy pogo punk riffs, like on "Bite The Hand, Purge The Flesh". It's definitely more varied than what these guys do in, say, Revenge, with more melodic and catchy hooks infecting the violent, chaotic thrash, but there's no shortfall of ferocity. Nemtheanga's overwrought vocals clash with this sound, delivering the bleak narrative in a mixture of powerful, operatic singing and harsher shrieks, and it comes out sounding remarkably unique. His vocals wander across the album, the lyrics describing a plotline involving armed urban warfare, a lone wolf resistance fighter, and ultimately the martyrdom of the central character, all of which makes for unusual and interesting subject matter for a black/death concept album. It's an awesome, albeit quirky mix of supreme Canadian black metal ferocity and powerful, impassioned vocals with more brains than usual at work behind the bestial assault...definitely one of 2010's most idiosyncratic extreme metal albums, and an amazing debut that blew away my expectations for what this was going to sound like. This is highly recommended to fans of Revenge, Kerasphorus and other Read-related projects, and anyone into psychotic, nihilistic black/death metal who's interested in hearing a unique vocal approach outside of the standard guttural grunting and shrieking that we usually hear.