I've listened to this slab of spaced-out devilcore at least a dozen times since it came in the door. From the sounds of Armageddon and the oddly elegiac synthesizer melody that creeps across "Intromancy" like a warped Fabio Frizzi piece, to the murky and monstrously low-fi Holy Terror hardcore that the band unleashes throughout the rest of these ten tracks, Through Light To Night is a depraved vision of a world consumed in unending violence set to some seriously fucked-up and far-out metalpunk. I loved the previous 7"s I've picked up from this somewhat enigmatic Swedish band, but Broken Cross's first full-length is so much weirder than that stuff, a shot of utter ugliness and demented thrash that's even more psychedelic and terrifying.
As before, the music is directly informed by the classic evil hardcore of 90s bands like Integrity, Ringworm and Gehenna, combining rampaging punk fury with waling heavy metal guitars and crushing, blackened riffage. But this stuff gets so much weirder, and much rawer, with a production aesthetic closer to the no-fi sound of old black metal demos. You'll get a song like "World Demolition" that exudes the most Maidenesque aspects of classic GISM, a snarling, hateful blast of raw hardcore erupting with soaring, dive-bombing metal guitar heroics, or the stomping circle-pit aggression of "Total Isolation". But then they splatter these songs with all kinds of bizarre effects and oddball production tricks that can make this sound incredibly hallucinatory. There's weird droning vocals and sudden blasts of spacey electronic effects that blare across the front of the mix, or parts where a single guitar will be suddenly pushed all the way into the red, turning it into a shrieking blast of noise. Doleful acoustic guitars appear, sorrowfully strummed over rumbling masses of noise and sampled voices, and bizarre junkyard percussion appears rattling and clanking over another one of their rousing, epic NWOBHM-esque riffs.
At times, the songs can get so chaotic that it feels like you're hearing two different songs playing at the same time, everything snarled in a bleary, drug-addled haze of low-fi violence. And the nearly eight-minute "Poison Of Insanity" sprawls out into total madness, moving from grainy, etheric soundscapes laced with the distant cries of seagulls and children, to spooky Moog sounds and more of that ramshackle percussion, finally giving way to yet another majestic, dirt-streaked melody, all moody and twisted. And yet from start to finish, Night is seriously catchy, every one of these songs delivering a killer hook underneath the gnarled riffs and blood-choked bellowing toad-vocals and primitive blackthrash slime, with some fantastic songwriting lurking below all of that filth and fucked-up ferocity. A terrifically bizarre and ripping album from this one-man band, with apocalyptic lyrics and grim collage art from Integrity's Dwid Hellion that only enhance the overall dementia.