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CARPATHIAN FOREST  Strange Old Brew  CD   (Peaceville)   12.98


  Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...

  Newly reissued on vinyl in late 2013 (and back in stock on CD), Carpathian Forest's second album Strange Old Brew saw the misanthropic Norwegian pervo-metallers continuing to drag their Celtic Frost influenced black metal deeper into realms of experimental weirdness and filthy hardcore punk abandon. Over a decade after it's release, Brew still sounds pretty fucking weird, the songs made up of a combination of pulverizing crust punk, classic Norwegian black metal, industrial elements, weird electronic soundscapes and horrific synthesizer music. The band's weirdness kicks in pretty quick with the eldritch black horror and pounding ritual industrial of the intro "Damnation Chant", which starts this off sounding like some primo old-school Cold Meat Industries stuff. From there, the band heads into a handful of rocking, filthy punk songs, unleashing weird robotic vocals that pop up in a couple of spots, the strange cabaret-tinged doom of "Thanatology", and passages of booming industrial percussion that suddenly appear on "Martyr / Sacrificulum", where heavy tympani-like drums pound relentlessly beneath the frosty blackened riffs and blasting drums. None of this is as unexpected as the bizarre, ghostly trip-hop that suddenly appears mid-album with "House Of The Whipcord", though, where the drums become a murky mechanical pulse that plods beneath a mixture of spectral female vocals and ghoulish whispering. And then out of nowhere, a soaring saxophone enters the fray, sending eerie noir-jazz melodies streaking high above the otherworldly haunted-house piano and murky trip hop creep. That's followed by the delirious, blues-stained doom of "Cloak Of Midnight" that also features more of those guest vocals from Nina Hex, which appear just as the drums give way to a clanking industrial rhythm and the song drops off into vast funereal doom. "Theme From Nekromantikk" is a strange synth-heavy neo-classical rendition of the opening theme to J�rg Buttgereit's nihilistic 1987 art/gore classic Nekromantik, followed by the even more unsettling sounds of "The Good Old Enema Treatment ", another bizarre soundscape that combines scatological ambience and dissonant synthesizers. All of that ghastly experimentation is balanced with an equal amount of heaviness, though, tracks like "Bloodcleansing" welding vicious Teutonic thrash riffs to the band's frostbitten atmosphere, while rippers like "Mask Of The Slave" and "The Suicide Song " race with iron hooves on the back of monstrous Motorhead-esque speed metal grooves and orgiastic cries, slipping into punishing mid-tempo breakdowns and sudden surges of crushing Frostbitten sludge, their blackened violence all wrapped in a bloody haze of unrepentant sleaze and savage S&M imagery.


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