���� Supreme mechanical devilry! We've picked up a couple of older Aborym albums that, for some odd reason, we never stocked back when they first came out, despite the fact that I've been a big fan of this strange Italian black metal outfit. Their stuff is some of the best within the nebulous realm of 'industrial black metal'. Now that some of these older releases have received recent vinyl reissues, I figured we'd go ahead and pick up some of these back-catalog titles in an effort to turn some of you guys on to the furious, futuristic, often bizarre heaviness that this band has been blasting for the past twenty years.
���� First up is 2006's Generator, one of my favorite albums of theirs. Originally released on CD from Season Of Mist (and now available on vinyl from French label Dead Seed Productions), this dystopian nightmare is one of their heaviest. By this point, front-man Attila Csihar had left the band, replaced by Preben "Prime Evil" Mulvik (Mysticum), and Bard "Faust" Eithun (Emperor) became their permanent drummer, taking the place of the band's long-suffering drum machine. Marking a shift towards a more complex, atmospheric sound, the disc starts off with a surge of orchestral black ambience, rumbling, dissonant piano and malevolent choral vocals sweeping across deep, subterranean rumblings. But once it kicks into "Disgust And Rage (Sic Transit Gloria Mundi)", the album proceeds to unleash its furious industrialized black metal with a heightened sense of grandeur. That first song is a ferocious blast of technical blackened riffery enfolded with cold, regal power, infused with symphonic strings and icy electronic textures, growing stranger as it further unfolds with liturgical chant-like voices emerging amid flecks of digital debris and an increasingly synthetic feel. The band's signature fusion of symphonic black metal, electronic elements and winding song structures with occult-influenced, often eschatological imagery is once again in full force here; while not as bizarre as D�dheimsgard or as brutal as Mysticum, Aborym interjects stretches of sleek black drone, clanking rhythms, alien glitchery, and sputtering, sickly electronic beats, infesting the music with an inhuman technological malevolence.
���� And while the remainder of the album is loaded with that ferocious industrial black metal, they continue to layer the songs with strange shuffling percussive loops, Charles Manson samples, demented carnivalesque organs, bursts of pneumatic hiss and blaring synth horns, with "Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea " even mutating into a ferocious technoid ripper and "Man Bites God" (which features a returning guest spot from Csihar) at times transforming into something more resembling Skinny Puppy than black metal. But even at its weirdest, Generator maintains a clear connection to that classic Nordic black metal sound, full of frost-burnt drama and majesty.
���� This vinyl edition on Dead Seed is pretty hefty, presented in a deluxe, heavyweight (and slightly oversized) casewrapped gatefold jacket and accompanied by a big foldout poster.