Now available on CD, both black and white vinyl (with corresponding covers), and LP picture disc; all vinyl editions also come with an A2 size Blasphemy poster.
It's been years since we last had this highly influential, utterly barbaric album in stock here at C-Blast, but Blasphemy's seminal Fallen Angel Of Doom is at last once again available, a crucial slab of early 90s ear-hate reissued by the folks at Nuclear War Now. Originally vomited up on the notorious Wild Rags label in 1990, Fallen Angel Of Doom is ground zero for what would eventually come to be called "bestial black metal" and "war metal"; despite its revered status amongst black and death metal extremists, this album also has just as many detractors, with many dismissing Blasphemy's sound as nothing but ear-splitting, low-fi noise. Which it definitely is, to an extent. Comprised of members with names like Black Priest Of The 7 Satanic Blood Rituals, Caller Of The Storms, Black Hearts Of Damnation And Impurity and Nocturnal Grave Desecrator And Black Winds, these guys were the core of the infamous Ross Bay Cult out of Vancouver, feral war-thugs who combined the skin-blistering speed and ferocity of grindcore, the rot-soaked filth of early death metal, and the satanic evil of black metal into one of the filthiest, most unapproachable sounds to come out of the late 80s underground, one that would have an undeniable influence on Beherit and later bands like Conqueror, Teitanblood, Revenge, Goatpenis, Black Witchery, Vassafor and Diocletian. An entire school of bestialized metal sprung up in the wake of this album. This is the original black seed.
This is genuinely violent music, a kind of blasphemic blackgrind hammered out by leather-clad, chain-draped cavemen, the vocals a bizarre, ghastly snarl often mutated by weird effects; the riffs could be described as simplistic, but are also utterly bludgeoning, delivered with a rabid aggression that can almost resemble the most insane 80s hardcore punk. The songs can also suddenly erupt into an insanely noisy blur of buzzsaw guitar noise and rumbling bass laid out over the artillery-style blastbeats and whiplash-inducing tempo shifts; those tempo changes are savage, suddenly shifting from the chaotic blasting into a pulverizing mid-tempo riff. And it's laced with sickening, hallucinatory noisescapes that are deliberately arranged throughout the album, congealing pools of droning electronic murk, backmasked snarls and weird processed choral voices all swirling through the black blast; opener "(Winds Of The Black Godz) Intro" sounds like a fragment of some obscure German kosmische outfit spinning murkily beneath a pile of rotting grave-shrouds, while the bleary, mournful keyboards that emerge at the end of "The Desolate One (Outro)" sort of resemble something off of the Nekromantik soundtrack. And "Goddess Of Perversity" unleashes a bizarre mixture of rumbling industrial-style ambience, ultra-chaotic off-time drumming, and cacophonic guitar solos that produces the most unsettling song on the album. Absolutely essential listening for anyone hooked on the noisiest and most chaotic extremes of black/death metal.