���� 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.
���� The first-ever live album from cybernetic Italian black metallers Aborym, Groningen delivers a killer early live performance from the band, captured at a show at the Vera Club in Groningen, Holland in May of 2004. Packaged in a cool-looking reflective silver digipak, the disc presents a complete eight song, forty minute set from these depraved industrialized demons, when they were arguably at the height of their powers. The set is mostly made up of songs from the band's 2001 album Fire Walk With Us! ("Fire Walk With Us", "Total Black", "Love The Death As The Life") and 2003's With No Human Intervention ("Faustian Spirit Of The Earth", "Digital Goat Masque"); in addition, Aborym inject a handful of interstitial noise and electronic interludes with titles like "Harsh-Industrial Inferno" and "Techno-Industrial Inferno", tying together their album material in the live setting with throbbing, semi-improvised industrial dance workouts drenched in harsh distortion and clanking sampled rhythms, stretches of rumbling demonic ambience, or intensely chaotic and blackened blastscapes that swarm with evil looping guitar-swarms, shrieking electronics, pounding technoid rhythms and monstrous, putrid vocals. Pretty vicious, and intensely noisy at times.
���� And the album material is definitely some of my favorite stuff of theirs. While later albums would become more experimental and hallucinatory, eventually incorporating other elements like electronic music influences, jazzy saxophone, operatic vocals, etc., this early stuff is more straightforward, fusing their raw, second-wave style black metal to backdrops of violent hardcore techno, harsh synths and electronic noise, the drum machine programming transforming songs like "Total Black" into frost-encrusted black metal epics riddled with hyperfast electronic rhythms that more resemble the sound of rapidly skipping CDs than your standard blastbeat action. It's also the era of the band where Attila Csihar (Mayhem, Sunn, Tormentor) handled the vocals, and his deranged, drawled screams and trademark weirdness were undoubtedly a crucial component of Aborym's savage and blackened psybermagick back then.
���� The recording quality is pretty good; in some of the set's more over-the-top moments, the often complex layering of samples that Aborym employs can sometimes get a little lost in the mix, and parts of their set can get slightly muddled, but that's offset by the frenzied energy of the band's performance, making this an enjoyable listen for fans of Aborym's industrial madness.