��Finally got around to picking up all four of the Burning Church cassettes that came out on French black metal/industrial label Infernal Kommando. Instead of the ultra low-fi brain-damaged blackthrash that we usually get from this label, this Australian band delivers a more experimental (but certainly still very low-fi) strain of black metal weirdness. While the band would obviously progress in certain ways with each subsequent recording, all of the Burning Church Forest releases that I've picked up so far are filled with grim, noisy strangeness that points towards the influence of both classic second-wave European black metal and the drug-induced psychosis and Satanic hallucinations invoked by Sweden's Abruptum. Hateful, sonically demented stuff that borders on chaos much of the time, I've been lovin' all of these tapes. Originally released as a digital download only, these albums were later reissued on cassette in tiny runs of sixty-six copies each, in xeroxed packaging that features a different photo of a burning church on each cover.
��On their 2010 release Book III, Burning Church Forest continue to explore their mix of Abruptum-esque insanity, crushing black metal blast, and extended forays into dreamy synthesizer ambience, blazing through another four epic-length tracks of murky, experimental black metal. They kick it off with the wall of noisy primitive blast that opens "The Power of the Inferno"; the drums pound relentlessly below the band's swarm of droning, frostbitten guitars and unintelligible hateful croaks buried way down in the mix. Once again, the band scratches at the gravestone of the original early 90's Norwegian black metal scene for inspiration, channeling that necro aesthetic through increased and enhanced volumes of noise. The production is really rough, befitting their frenzied noisy assault, the recording bathed in hiss and rumble as the music drops off into long passages of droning dark Tangerine Dream-esque synthesizer, celestial choral voices cloaked in fog and plumes of soft swirling black static, the black metal dropping out completely at times as the band soars into black cloudscapes of ghostly kosmiche drift. That leads into even more formless sound as "Kirkebrann" creeps in, monstrous moaning vocals rolling in on waves of suffocating reverb, the sound transforming into a kind of inchoate black ambience, deep droning frequencies and subterranean rumblings filling the air, blasts of distant orchestral sound ripping through the gloom. This stuff has an almost Gnaw Their Tongues-like feel, a chaotic, surrealistic mass of sound infested with gibbering mindless horror. The tape eventually makes it's way back to more of that murky chaotic black metal though, and on "Feel the Heat from the Flames" they dig in to another one of those killer blackened motorik grooves that I dug on their previous tapes, but for the most part, this is one of the more fucked-up and formless of all of the Burning Church Forest tapes. Killer.