Back in stock!
I haven't stocked this 2003 album from Aborym until now, but since their newest album Psychogrotesque recently came out and I've been listening to it constantly, I've been working on picking up whatever other Aborym titles are still in print for the shop. This was their third album following Kali-Yuga Bizarre and Fire Walk With Us!, both of which captured Aborym's ongoing evolution that began with their strange experiments in electronically-enhanced black metal in the mid 90s. By this point, their mix of satanic blackened techno and experimental shapeshifting black/death was fully formed, a brand of sleek futuristic BM terror that positioned Aborym alongside the likes of Mysticum, Anaal Nathrakh, Declaration Of War-era Mayhem and (especially) Dodheimsgard. Fronted by singer Attila Csihar's awesome demented vocalizations that range from throat singing, blackened shrieks, and chant like intonations, and powered by eerie samples and blasting industrial black metal, this is fearsome, violent music that repudiates the claims of commercialization that many BM purists levelled at bands like this who utilized electronic elements. Feel-good music, this ain't. And it's very much rooted in a classic black metal sound, machinelike blastbeat drumming performed with rigid precision, and dizzying arpeggio sweeps and classical-influenced soloing coating the sound with a brittle layer of ice, while bits of electronic ambience and effects are strewn throughout the ferocious mechanized black metal assaults. Like it states in the booklet, "Aborym plays alien-black-hard/industrial exclusively".
With No Human Intervention's opening title track is feral, mechanical black metal with a killer programmed blastbeat and blackened death riff that appears later in the song, shifting gears into galloping thrash and then revealing some minor techno elements that creep in, like programmed snare rushes and swells of orchestral electronic ambience. It still mostly sounds like an electronically enhanced classic black metal band, though. As the album goes on, the music mutates more and more as harsh, unexpected edits, caustic computer glitchery and synthetic ambience increasingly mixes with the warped, evil black blast and crushing slower death metal riffage. It's not till the fourth track "Humechanics-Virus" that Aborym finally starts to inject their bursts of drum n' bass and hardcore techno into the music; when this kicks in, the aggressive electronic beats come in blasts and blurts, pounding savage rhythms seething beneath catchy blackened melodic hooks and the hellish vocals. The track "Does Not Compute" stands out with looped machine noises, factory floor ambience and clanking rhythms opening the song, then turning into a jittery, hard-edged drum n' bass workout laced with electronic noises and a massive sinister bassline. The pure techno of "Cheronobyl Generation" is as close to actual dance music as Aborym gets here, but with it's scorched blackened shrieks and evil tone, it's hardly party music. The rest of the album is rife with more crazed electro-BM experimentation that ranges from weird Morbid Angel-like soloing
and orgasmic female moans, harpsichord sections backed by pummeling industrial beats and hoovering techno synths, and stretches of creepy slasher movie soundtrack music. The album constantly shifts and changes shape, with an almost Mr Bungle-like tendency for wild stylistic leaps. "The Triumph" even features an emotional ballad-like breakdown with synths and a soaring guitar solo that sounds like something off of an 80s hair metal album, right before the band kicks into an equally soaring kosimiche hallucination that combines the sounds of agonized screaming and demented carnival music.
A strange and unpredictable album, Intervention is one of my favorite electro/black metal records and highly recommended to fans of bizarre, experimental, digitally-possessed BM and the likes of Dodheimsgard and Blacklodge. This US release on Mercenary Musik also features an enhanced CD-Rom portion of the disc that features a music video for the title track "With No Human Intervention".