I know that I'm a minority, but I fucking love this one-man band from French weirdo Luc Mertz. I've only scratched the surface of what he's recorded under the name Zarach'Baal'Tharagh (the band has released hundreds of tapes over the years, going back to the 90s), but everything that I have listened to so far I've enjoyed greatly. Yes, the music is sloppy and primitive to the point of sounding totally inept, a kind of brain-damaged blackened punk that makes bands like Malveillance and Sexdrome sound like prog rock. Yes, the songs are all built out of the same set of four chords. But there's no denying the violent, psychotic energy that is emitted from ZBT's French necropunk weirdness. This five song tape is the most recent offering from Zarach'Baal'Tharagh that I've been able to get for C-Blast, and it's fucking great. The tape opens with a weird intro that starts with some nationalistic French orchestral music, horns and strings and booming tympani, but then the drums drop in and start playing along with the recording, a simple pounding punk beat synching up with the orchestra. And then it plunges into the filth; the title track is a plodding sub-Venom blast of blackened punk insanity with

awesome high pitched screams and mangled guitar, the playing just tight enough to keep everything from collapsing into a total car wreck, but constantly teeters right on the edge of raw and raucous slop. All of the songs are in this vein, primitive low fi black thrash with some KILLER rocking riffs

and those trademark psychotic squiggly guitar solos and random guitar noise splattered all over, with the chugging brain-damaged blackthrash of "Necessary Evil" being one of my favorites on the tape, alongside the ripping blackened hardcore of "Terror Of Sleep Paralysis" that sounds more like some mid-80s Midwestern US hardcore band than anything from the French BM scene. It wraps up with an outro that again mashes together an older recording of a triumphant French symphony merged with the sounds of crashing fighter planes and mortar blasts and those pounding distorted punk drums. Very weird, but that's no surprise. Released in a limited edition of two hundred fifty copies.