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ID is not 1-5. Defaulting to French Black Metal

AFFLICTIS LENTAE From Nothing...To Nothing CD (Infernal Kommando) 11.98

The first time I heard Afflictis Lentae was on the split 7" with The Austrasian Goat that came out on At War With False Noise, and ever since hearing that brief blast of nuclear blackthrash from this French lone wolf, I've been looking for more of his music. It didn't take long, as Infernal Kommando has just issued this cd collection of out-of-print material from this blackthrash maniac, and ever since I got our copies of From Nothing...To Nothing, I've been spinning this disc almost non-stop! The album collects the seven tracks from the band's Saint Office LP, the Intolerance Deathsquad cassette, and the two tracks from the split with The Austrasian Goat, and all of this shit is blackthrash GOLD. I didn't even realize that Afflictis Lentae was a one-man band (the brainchild of a guy who goes by "Nuclear Thrash Gaichal") until I started looking into the band, the music is so tight and CRUSHING that it sounds like the product of a full band. But Gaichal handles all of the guitars, vocals and programming, crafting one awesome thrash riff after another, his voice soaring from an insane blackened shriek to deep, devilish growls to weird wailing in the blink of an eye, tons of Slayerized soloing and whammy-bar divebombs splattered all over, the sound a cross between the classic Teutonic thrash of Sodom and Kreator and the hyperblast black metal of Marduk, but with Tangerine Dream-y ambience drifting out of the cracks between songs, and strange samples, drunken bar-hall sing-alongs and murky drones lurking at the edges of the bestial blackthrash assaults. And the drum machine programming is out of fucking control. Usually, I tend to think that drum machines are a liability in speed/thrash bands, but Gaichal manages to eke a surprisingly natural drum sound, thick and dense and resonant...that is, of course, until he sets the drum machines for CHAIN GUN BLAST, where the drums suddenly sound like the mechanized blasting of machine guns going off. AWESOME. It's like hearing Sodom outfitted with industrial blasts and creepy electronic ambience. This is some of the rippingest French blackthrash ever, with killer song titles like "Exterminate and Dominate ", "Sadistic Messiah ", "The Eliminator ", and "Panzer Delirium ", and there's even a bestial blackened cover of Judas Priest's "Nightcrawler"! Recommended!
Track Samples:
Sample : Reject The Devil
Sample : Sadistic Messiah
Sample : There Heretic Part I
Sample : Traitors Of Mankind

ALCEST Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde LP (Hyperrealist Records) 15.98

Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

Back in stock once again!
The US vinyl version of Souvenirs seemed to go out of print almost as soon as it was announced, and I was only able to get a couple copies of it. Released by Hyperrealist in a limited edition of 1000 copies, this domestic pressing has the same artwork as the European LP release on Northern Silence (which is itself different from the CD release), and the copies we have are on black vinyl.
When Souvenirs d'un autre monde (which translates to "Memories Of Another World") came out in late 2007, it seemed really weird that the most beautiful rock album of the year (in my mind) came to us by way of the French black metal underground. Looking back, I've heard alot of other equally beautiful, very un-black metal albums come out of the black metal scene, but Alcest's latest full length is still one of the best, and one of the few albums to really take me back to the height of the whole UK dreampop/shoegaze scene that I grew up with. Souvenirs... is a perfect pop record, totally immersed in delicate jangly melodies and gorgeous blasts of shoegazey distortion and utterly removed from the blissed-out black metal shred of Ameseours, which is the other band that Neige from Alcest plays in. No, there are only the barest traces of metal found on this disc, heard in the super-distorted speedpicked guitars roaring down underneath the beautiful dreamy pop hooks and heartrending melodies, and in the occasional blasts of furious double-bass drumming that erupts here and there. For the most part, this is pure heavy shoegazer rock refashioned in a more distorted and epic form, much like how Justin Broadrick has taken early 90's shoegaze and molded that sound into the blissful grinding dreamsludge of Jesu, only here the sound is all dense layers of lush guitars and fragile fingerpicked acoustics, like My Bloody Valentine powered by a black metal drummer, or a heavier Chapterhouse or Catherine Wheel. All six songs here follow this route, awash in majestic swells of guitar and keyboards and dreamy vocal harmonies that evoke images of innocence and springtime. While Alcest's sound is drawn directly from early 90's shoegaze, those of you that are fans of the more atmospheric sounds of bands like Drudkh and Agalloch will likely love this album just as much as fans of Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. Highly recommended! Comes in a full color digipack with booklet.

ALCEST Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde CD (Profound Lore) 14.99

When Souvenirs d'un autre monde (which translates to "Memories Of Another World") came out in late 2007, it seemed really weird that the most beautiful rock album of the year (in my mind) came to us by way of the French black metal underground. Looking back, I've heard alot of other equally beautiful, very un-black metal albums come out of the black metal scene, but Alcest's latest full length is still one of the best, and one of the few albums to really take me back to the height of the whole UK dreampop/shoegaze scene that I grew up with. Souvenirs... is a perfect pop record, totally immersed in delicate jangly melodies and gorgeous blasts of shoegazey distortion and utterly removed from the blissed-out black metal shred of Ameseours, which is the other band that Neige from Alcest plays in. No, there are only the barest traces of metal found on this disc, heard in the super-distorted speedpicked guitars roaring down underneath the beautiful dreamy pop hooks and heartrending melodies, and in the occasional blasts of furious double-bass drumming that erupts here and there. For the most part, this is pure heavy shoegazer rock refashioned in a more distorted and epic form, much like how Justin Broadrick has taken early 90's shoegaze and molded that sound into the blissful grinding dreamsludge of Jesu, only here the sound is all dense layers of lush guitars and fragile fingerpicked acoustics, like My Bloody Valentine powered by a black metal drummer, or a heavier Chapterhouse or Catherine Wheel. All six songs here follow this route, awash in majestic swells of guitar and keyboards and dreamy vocal harmonies that evoke images of innocence and springtime. While Alcest's sound is drawn directly from early 90's shoegaze, those of you that are fans of the more atmospheric sounds of bands like Drudkh and Agalloch will likely love this album just as much as fans of Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. Highly recommended! Comes in a full color digipack with booklet.

ALIEN DEVIANT CIRCUS Satanic Djihad CD (Flamme Noire) 15.98

Nice, some new French filth from the consistently-killer black metal label Flamme Noir. The discs that I have thus far grabbed from this label have all blown me away, from the cold, satanic mecha-black metalof C.Y.T., to the furious hate-filled distortion whiteouts and murderous buzzsaw ambience of Drastus. The kind of stuff that seems to drop the temperature in the room a couple of degrees whenever you put it in the deck. Now we've got a new Flamme Noir outrage to run by you, and bud, this thing is pretty fucked. On the surface, Alien Deviant Circus appears to be black metal, of that peculiarly French variety with icy, dissonant guitars that form into strange riffs and unexpected song structures. But it's not long before this album reveals it's twisted agenda as looped film samples, volleys of pounding tribal drums, looped machine noises, skittery breakbeats, savage gabba beats lifted from a Bloody Fist 12", swells of orchestral majesty and slabs of malevolent black ambience are all layered together into evil industrial dirges, which make jarring, almost frightening transitions into feirce buzzing black metal riffs and hyperspeed blastbeat programming. Style-wise, Alien Deviant Circus are closer to the industrial/electro-black metal of bands like Manes, Dødheimsgard, Mysticum, Black Hole Generator and Aborym than the current crop of French avant-gardists, but there is still that perverse French sensibility still burning at the core of these hallucinogenic tracks. Could be because ADC actually has a member of Mutiilation in it's lineup, one of the original members of the notorious Les Légions Noires. This doesn't sound at all like Mutiilation though, with the mangled drum programming and bleeping digital effects that swarm through these tracks; at times, this sounds more like Deathspell Omega buried by explosive gabba beats and sheets of electronic fuckery, or a more hypnotic version of Dødheimsgard with heavy tribal beats. Fans of the aforementioned bands should check this out, or if yer into the weird industrial/black metal deathscapes of C.Y.T. and Spektr. Blazing, warped sci-fi industrial black metal, with an overtly Satanic credo that reads like this:
Art, philosophy and drugz are the way ov this awakening towards Satan. We shall awake in order to match our vibration to his source and to arrange the manifste according to our will…
Let’s draw our strengh from decay, let us sawmp with this source ov creativity, expression and death!!!
Order shall never rise from disorder again!!!
Dethroned mankind shall end his cycle in pain and dishonor!!!
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
Vae victis, and they’ll be numerous!!!
Oderint dum metuant!!!
The CD is limited to 500 copies, and has some great devilish sci-fi artwork included in the packaging, all created by the singer from what I can tell. Recommended!
Track Samples:
Sample : Eschaton
Sample : Follow The Left Hand Path
Sample : Kaly Maha Devi

ALUK TODOLO self-titled 7 INCH VINYL (Public Guilt) 6.98

Aluk Todolo's 7" is available again, repressed in a limited run of two hundred copies for their recent East Coast tour (which slayed; I caught the band in Baltimore at Golden West Cafe a few weeks ago with Darsombra and Lussuria, and they had me completely zoned by the end of their set), with hand-stamped labels and no obi-strip this time.
Featuring members of such esteemed French black metal iconoclasts as Vediog Svaor and Diamatregon, Aluk Todolo's debut EP is an amazing, occult-tinged eruption of heavy drone/Kraut/trance rock that uses the bands driving motorik formations to explore transcendental consciousness and trance-like states. Each song on this 7" is identified with only an arcane set of runes, and the compositions are based on music conjured during Aluk Todolo's live improvised sessions. The A side sports a rhythmic drone rock jam that builds into sheets of guitar sound similiar to Rhys Chatham overlaid with recordings of legendary occultist Aleister Crowley. On the B side, the band generates a powerful krautrock influenced number that pulsates like a darker Circle/AMT jam. The riff is totally trance inducing before it fades into a cavernous grey drone, then exploding suddenly back into full-on heavy hypno rock. This EP is a killer debut, and I'm dying to hear more from this band. Aluk Todolo's take on kraut/drone influenced heavy psych rock imbues the music with the sort of bleak blackness that you'd expect from their black metal projects. There's parts of their jams that make me think of the obvious modern heavy hitters in the field of heavy trance-psyche, like the aforementioned Acid Mothers Temple and Cirlce, as well as Circle side project Pharoah Overlord, as Aluk Todolo can get pretty heavy...but I also hear that Rhys Chatham/Robert Poss/Band Of Susans brand of overloaded guitar drone in parts of these songs that push the intensity level even further. Awesome stuff, highly recommended. Our buddy J.R. at Public Guilt did a killer job of presenting this EP as well, packaging the 7" in a simple but effective glossy gatefold sleeve printed in silver and grey inks, with cabalistic symbols and photography.

ALUK TODOLO Finsternis CD (Utech) 14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Premier Contact
Sample : Quatrième Contact
Sample : Totalité

ALUK TODOLO Finsternis LP (Public Guilt) 23.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Premier Contact
Sample : Quatrième Contact
Sample : Totalité

ALUK TODOLO Descension CD (Public Guilt) 11.98

First heard Aluk Todolo on that debut 7" that the band released on Implied Sound last year, which I thought was a real blast of fetid hypno rock inscribed with cryptic occult imagery and one hell of a pounding groove, major groove, a kind of satanic trance rock meltdown that felt like it was crawling right off of the edge of the vinyl. Great stuff that caught the attention of a lot of people that follow this sort of thing, and this past November saw the release of Aluk Todolo's first full length on Public Guilt, which has been building a heavy buzz ever since it came out. On Descension, Aluk Todolo have carved out a pitch-black krautrock masterpiece that ends up sounding akin to Circle performing the background music for a black mass while being mixed by Masami Akita armed with short-circuiting amplifiers in each hand, punctuating their nocturnal dronerock rituals with blasts of white-hot electronic skzzzz.
Aluk Todolo features members of the black metal cult Diametragon, but the main thread that ties the two bands together is the musician's use of brutal white noise as a kind of lead instrument; in Diametragon, the band splatters their razorwire black metal asaults with ear shredding skree, but here the noise is draped in layers over skeletal rock instrumentation, a basic drums/guitar/bass lineup that forms minimalistic propulsive jams that swim in black feedback and atmospheric speaker buzz. Like This Heat and Einsutrzende Neubaten filtered through an endless blackdronenoise ritual, sinister melodic sigils forming out of the fuzz and forming a claustraphobic, creepy low fi psych epic, their rhythms relentless in movement. The opening "Obedience" starts off as swirling black ambience with a shuffling sheet metal rhythm banging away in the background, and then suddenly a wavering female chorale appears and the whole song suddenly explodes into a clamorous, propulsive krautrock jam, simplistic driving drumming slicing through a storm of overloaded demon howls and white noise. It's really low fi and garagey sounding, but powerful and totally in-the-red. On "Burial Ground", the band sets up a tense, claustrophobic vibe with a simple guitar arpeggio played over weird FX, rusted metal percussion, tinny evil drones and a plodding drumbeat. "Woodchurch" is another slow, plodding jam that almost seems to invert the guitar part from the previous track and crank the distortion way up while layers of machine noise and FX shift and warp above it; the last track, "Disease", has another shambling hypnotic drumbeat playing in an odd time signature accompanied by trippy distorted effects and blasts of overmodulated acid guitar clipping throughout the jam.
Imagine an evil, hypnotic fusion of the super blown-out blackness of Wold and Akitsa, Harry Pussy's shambolic noise, and This Heat. Slow marches into unnerving noise frequencies and atmospheric clatter are served up as black magic meditations, and alternate with invocations of demonic krautrock. Highly recommended !
Track Samples:
Sample : aluktodolo_burialground
Sample : aluktodolo_obedience

AMESOEURS self-titled CD (Profound Lore) 14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Amesoeurs
Sample : Faux Semblants
Sample : Gas In Veins

ARKHON INFAUSTUS Perdition Insanabilis CD (Red Stream) 11.98

The furious fourth full-length from French satanic black metal outfit Arkhon Infaustus circa 2005, which was originally released on Osmose Productions before going out of print. Luckily for fans of fucked up, psychotic French blackness, Red Stream re-issued Perdition Insanabilis with this digipack edition, inscribed in alien code and classic Satanic icons. Arkhon Infaustus developed a bit of a rep over the years since forming in the mid-90's; their releases have been censored in several countries due to ultraviolent album art and lyrics that outlined acts of Satanic perversion and rough S&M-related imagery, and the band is pretty outspoken regarding their fierce anti-christian/satanic ideology. Musically, they play a demented fusion of death metal and black metal, kind of in the vein of Zyklon and also reminiscent of the total sonic evil of Anaal Nathrakh, with some additional doom elements stitched into the mix. The songs blaze by with relentless double bass blasting, awesome chaotic drumming, and chunky, downtuned death riffing and complex layers of dismal minor key melodies. And the sound is heavy, really heavy, with a massive bottom end that will rattle your ribcage. The vocals are disorientating, often with multiple deep death growls and blackened rasps all singing different lyrics at the same time, adding to the awesome "out of phase" vibe that seeps through the entire album. And there's plenty more of that fucked up French weirdness at work here too: creatively placed samples and electronic drones, manipulated feedback that crafts their trans-dimensional ambience, executing vertigo-inducing time changes (seriously, the drummer on this disc is fucking awesome), crazed dissonant shredding, harmonized chanting, and electronically-fucked vocals. Tracks like "Whirlwind Journey" even hint at some distinctly old-school Voivod and Celtic Frost influences, while "Saturn Motion Theology" reveals a lumbering slab of ultraheavy blackened doom that reaches psychedelic heights as sheets of wailing feedback are draped over the sour, slightly out-of-tune guitar harmonies and the pulverizing central dronedirge riff. Crushing. Definitely another essential blast of bizarre French malevolence! And the packaging for Perdition Insanabilis is great, too; the booklet includes text that has to be decoded to be read, using a system of alternating lines, and the photos of the band are pretty rad, with their eyes covered in gauze as if they have been torn out after witnessing some hellish horror.

ARKHON INFAUSTUS Orthodoxyn CD (Red Stream) 11.98

The supremely blackened 2007 album from France's Arkhon Infaustus, Orthodoxyn is their fourth, released in Europe on Osmose but now available here in the States on the esteemed Red Stream label. Opening with the lurching dissonance of "Trigarammaton", Arkhon Infaustus again plunges us into a fetid tangle of brutal, atonal death metal and complex black metal with songs that combine crushing, chunky riffing and slow, doomy passages with complex layers of guitar composed into droning, fucked-up melodies and alien harmonies. Much of the music on Orthodoxyn is slow, huge doomic riffs slithering through fields of evil dissonance with gutteral layered vocals that create a weird disorienting effect, the lyrics surrounded by overt satanic imagery and fascinating lyrics that infuse their goat-worshipping concepts with feverish visions that are drawn from biblical scriptures, scenes of sexual perversion, and quantum physics. I can hear a similiarity to fellow French black metallers Deathspell Omega, especially in the fucked up, avant-garde riffing and bizarre song structures that Arkhon Infaustus employs, but these guys are much, much heavier, their atonal dirges and downtuned riffage often broaching Incantation territory. These parameters of Arkhon Infaustus's sound make this another crucial slab of French black metal, filled with experimental guitar textures and abstract melodic leads matched by pulverizing heaviness, with an undercurrent of disturbing dissonance that constantly underscores their music. Another album of brutal, blackened French death from these masters, a must-get if you were into their last album Perdition Insanabilis (which is another favorite around here), and lust for both the innovative French blackness of Antaeus, Deathspell Omega, S.V.E.S.T., Blut Aus Nord, and the discordant crush of bands like Incantation and even Portal. Includes a thick booklet with lyrics and artwork.
Track Samples:
Sample : Magnificat Satanas
Sample : Trigrammaton

AYMREV ERKROZ PREVRE Noir Voyage Obstrué De Rencontres Difformes CASSETTE (Infernal Kommando) 5.98

BLUT AUS NORD Mort CD (Candlelight) 14.98

The latest album from French black metal abstractionists Blut Aus Nord can't even really be called "black metal" at this point - their last album, the critically acclaimed The Work Which Transforms God, had already mutated their heavily ambient, icy blackness into a kind of seasick, doomy metal whose guitars slipped in and out of Slint-y math figures, chaotic buzzsaw thrash, and wobbly chords that sounded like they were floating in and out of tune, all surging over a punishing mechanized pulse that felt like the drum machine from Godflesh's Streetcleaner moving in reverse. But with Mort, Blut Aus Nord have completely slipped into the Forbidden Zone, presenting what is basically a single 47 minute track that is divided into eight chapters, almost entirely instrumental, and which drags you down into a murky, drug-induced state of horror populated with amorphous riffs that sound like their being played by Luc Lemay on heavy 'shrooms, winding guitar lines layered over one another and shifting in and out of tune, warbly and surreal sounding, while the terminally off-time Godfleshy drums pound erratically and dead monk chants and viscous growls drip across the music's pitch-black canvas of subterranean rumbles and gooey melting circus keyboards. At time, Mort starts to sound like a free jazz band moving through glue and flickering out of our dimension, constantly being swallowed up in the syrupy murky blackness, and clean, emotionally crushing singing emerges at times out of the muddy chaos to . Super asbtract and twisted, moving at a slow, lurching, lopsided crawl, sort of like a fucked up combination of Xasthur and newer Wolf Eyes and Abruptum, sad and surreal, weird and dreamlike, a masterpiece of hallucinatory post-black metal.
Track Samples:
Sample : Chapter III
Sample : Chapter V
Sample : Chapter VII

BLUT AUS NORD Ultima Thulee CD (Candlelight) 13.98

A crucial peice of French black metal history and an essential part of the puzzle that is Blut Aus Nord, the band's debut album from 1995 Ultima Thulee has been reissued by Candlelight, and it's a must-get for fans of metaphysical, atmospheric blackness. If you've gotten into Blut Aus Nord relatively recently through their acclaimed albums The Work Which Transforms God or last years Mort, then their first album might surprise you at first. Back then, Blut Aus Nord was primarily the work of founder/mastermind Vindisval, and the eight songs that make up Ultima Thulee are murky, thunderous blasts of buzzing low-fi black metal reminiscent of both Burzum and Emperor, filthy buzzsaw guitars and droning eerie keyboards, rolling double bass drumming and blastbeats, super heavy and ripping and atmospheric, reaching blizzard levels of churning black buzz that also call to mind the early works of Immortal. But it quickly becomes apparent that even this early in Blut Aus Nord's existence, the band was a heavily progressive, experimental force. Songs break apart midway to reveal ice-plated glaciers of vintage analog synthesizer-prog ambience straight out of some lost 80's horror movie. The vocals are strange and abstract much of the time, warped and sounding more like howling winds than a human throat. "My Prayer Beyond Ginnungagap" is totally devoid of black metal; instead, we are enshrouded in hauntingly beautiful chant-harmonies, a dark hymn drifting out of the night. Equally beautiful electronic appear ghostlike over droning midtempo riffs. And you can't even tell that Vindisval was using a drum machine here, it sounds so organic and natural. Fans of 90's black metal will groove on this heavily, and it's obviously an essential addition to the library of any serious follower of French black metal. Progressive and wildly original psychedelic blackness, with some of the coolest keyboard sounds ever used on a black metal album, presented in an almost entirely text-less package that simply features a set of photographs that evocatively capture an icy mountain range, a perfect visual accompaniment to Blut Aus Nord's frozen terrorscapes. Highly recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : Till' I Perceive Bifrost
Sample : The Plain of Ida
Sample : The Son of Hoarfrost

BLUT AUS NORD Memoria Vetusta CD (Candlelight) 13.98

The second in a series of reissues of early Blut Aus Nord albums presented by Candlelight Records, Memoria Vetusta is the French black metal band's second album from 1996, and as I sit here and listen to this, I'm thinking that it's probably my favorite out of all of the Blut Aus Nord albums. Don't get me wrong, everything that this band has released is amazing, no two albums of theirs are the same, and all are absolutely essential listening for fans of adventurous black metal and heavy, abstracted weirdness. But Memoria has got to have their catchiest songs ever, and I just can't stop listening to this album. This new edition is presented with new album artwork that consists of a series of green-tinted mountainscapes, which continues the visual theme from the reissue of the band's first album Ultima Thulee which was released simultaneously with this. Musically, this is Blut Aus Nord before they mutated into the interdimensional black art of their 00's output; on Memoria, the band unleash epic, ghoulish black metal blasts with heavy, emotive synthesizers that lend a classic prog rock/80's soundtrack vibe to the blackened buzzsaw assault. It's all as atmospheric and haunting as their debut, and the melodic hooks here are stunning, they'll stick in yer head for days. Some of the spacey guitar lines here even have a shoegazey shimmer to them, and all of the riffage is really inventive and powerful. An awesome combination of grandiose frostbitten black metal a la Emperor and woozy, surreal celestial beauty. And yeah, you can hear the band starting to mutate, the drum machines start to stumble here and there, breaking off into Godfleshy dirges and weird mathy rhythms that take you by surprise, and the guitars occasional take on that melted, flowing in-and-out-of-tune sheen that Blut Aus Nord would take to extreme levels with their later albums. Lots of clean Viking singing and heavenly chorales soar across the album too. Brilliant, psychedelic black metal, one of the best France has to offer. Highly recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Territory of Witches/Guardians of the Dark Lake
Sample : The Forsaken Voices of the Gosthwood's Shadowy Realm
Sample : On the Path of Wolf...Towards Dwarfhill

BLUT AUS NORD Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue With The Stars CD (Candlelight) 13.98

Track Samples:
Sample : The Cosmic Echoes of Non-Matter: Immaterial Voices of the Fathers
Sample : BLUT AUS NORD-Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue With The Stars

BLUT AUS NORD The Work Which Transforms God / Thematic Emanation 2xCD (Candlelight) 13.98

Dope double-CD reissue of the mindblowing fourth album from France's Blut Aus Nord, their most critically acclaimed release and the album that has garnered the band attention from far outside of the confines of the underground black metal scene. You can probably chalk that up to the fact that The Work Which Transforms God moves further outside of the parameters of black metal moreso than with any of their previous releases. The album was first released in 2003 in France, and it's sort of a concept album that deals with the band's philosophy of forward-thinking, new perceptions of reality, and constant evolution, although no lyrics are included here and it's all open to interpretation. Now we've got this new version reissued for the US through Candlelight and packaged with a second CD that contains the entire Thematic Emanation Of Archetypal Multiplicity EP. Growing weirder and more abstract with each release, Blut Aus Nord unleash some grim, searing black metal here, think early Emperor or Darkthrone, but at the same time they take that sound and warp it, melt it, mutating their filth-encrusted black metal buzz into a surreal drug trip filled with icy industrial ambience, deep gore gurgling vocals, huge stretches of drifting black dronescapes, passages of dub-like machine psych, and those queasy guitars that warble and lurch like someone is messing with the tuning pegs while they're playing the song. Those seasick guitar chords and guitar lines add alot of the unearthly ambience that makes this album so intense, permeated with an intangible, dreamlike dread. There's all kinds of rhythmic action happening here too, the drum machine sometimes grinding out a mechanized dirge a la Godflesh's Streetcleaner, or layering twisted tribal percussion that moves in and out of the background. The pinnacle of the album is the final song, "Procession Of The Dead Clowns", a lumbering ten minute dirge with spare, glacial drumming and a sorrowful, keening guitar melody, almost like a Jesu song but way more funereal and dismal and grim.
The second disc features the Thematic Emanation Of Archetypal Multiplicity EP, a more recent release from Blut Aus Nord that has five tracks of eerie, doomy dirges, fucked-up industrial clang, dank fields of black drone drifting over sparse drum machine beats, Gregorian-style chants, a weird breakbeat-heavy industrial dance track, and more of their frozen, lysergic ambience.

C.Y.T. Configuration Of A Yearned Twilight CD (Flamme Noire) 16.98

Configuration Of A Yearned Twilight IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

Alert to all fellow fanatics of demonic French black metal! Issued in a limited edition of 500 copies and already sold out at the source just like the Drastus Roars From The Old Serpents Paradise CD that we listed in the last update (which sold out here at CBLAST within 24 hours of the list going out!), C.Y.T's Configuration Of A Yearned Twilight is a similiarly frigid and inhuman blast of damaged, Satanic French black metal from the Flamme Noire imprint. Lately, the French black metal scene is starting to become more recognized for it's awesome weirdness and individuality, sort of comparable to the 'x-factor' that Japanese bands seems to have that makes their music inherently bizarre and cool as fuck. Featuring a member of Drastus, C.Y.T's vision is one of the more sinister I've experienced thus far, a sexually charged feverdream of gleaming Industrial ambience infested with razor blasts of hypersonic blistering BM, awesome ferocious riffs and dissonant guitar textures spit out like venom over the drummer's kinetic beats, who delivers a combination of light speed blastbeats and convoluted, super complex polyrhythms. It's an unearthly sounding blackthrash, harsh, fractured, the singer psychotically switching between a ranting hateful rasp and psychedelic chants hurled into the void, comparable to Deathspell Omega's recent music but even spacier, ""math-ier"", more atmosperic even, an impenetrable veil of fucked up sonic ultraviolence. This album is inredible and an absolute must for fans of fucked up, far out French BM, which makes it frustrating that we have a VERY small quantity of this available!

CARRION WRAITH self-titled CD (Ars Magna) 9.98

First off, Carrion Wraith scores points for their badass ultra-detailed logo. As you know, a killer logo is usually a portent of good music, and Carrion Wraith's thick, bloated root-like lettering that winds downwards like some sort of demonic tuber into what looks like a possessed deer skull is cool enough to set the bar pretty high. These French Canadian black metallers come though with the goods though, delivering seven lengthy songs of icy, distortion-drenched blackened misery. Singing in both French and English, vocalist Monarque delivers his visions of forest-demons and black woodlands ruled over by an undead Deer Lord ( also called the Carrion Wraith - uh, just read the booklet...) in a proper phlegm-spewing rasp, and the music is thick and hypnotic and buzzing, the distorted guitars cloaking dreary riffs and melodies in harsh trebly fuzz. The minor key riffs often have a blurry, dissonant quality that reminds me of Xasthur, but this tends to be much faster than Malefic's depressive black metal. Switching between blastbeats and punky mid-tempo rhythms, Carrion Wraith lace their sorrowful black buzz with bits of black ambience and lengthy field recordings of water birds and forest life, but mostly this is about awesome, heart-rending epic melodies, and every one of these songs is filled with them - my favorite being the utterly moving "L'Abysse De La Folie", which has one of the saddest-sounding black metal melodies ever. Definitely recommended for folks into Xasthur, Silencer, terminally downer black metal in general, and undead deer wraiths.
Track Samples:
Sample : His Rotting Crown And Carcass Throne
Sample : Through The Woods Of Wraiths And Gloom

CELESTE Misanthrope(s) CD (Denovali) 13.98

There's something special about how the French are able to take a sound that has been beaten to death - that of the apocalyptic metallic dirge that Neurosis pioneered on their Through Silver In Blood and developed further by Isis over the course of their first few albums - and twist it into something both bleaker, darker, and at the same time elegant and stentorian. Just off of the top of my head, there's Overmars, Year Of No Light, Omega Massif and HKY, four bands who all trace their cyclopean sludge metal sound back to Neurosis's revolutionary art-metal, but who all sound radically different from one another and from the more straightforward music that most of their American peers have been creating. From HKY's cosmic industro-doom psychdirge to the sky-reaching Disintegration worship of Year Of No Light and the blackened avant sludge opera of Overmars, it's obvious that French metallers are some of the best at taking this omnipresent sound and reinventing it in a way that few others are capable of doing.
The latest French band to be added to the list is Celeste, who just released their third album Misanthrope(s) on the excellent German label Denovali, which has brought us a number of quality albums from Daturah, Kodiak, Heirs, and other artful European sludge/metal outfits. Coming from Denovali, I had a hunch that Celeste were going to along the same lines as most of their other releases, which tend to run along the lines of post-rock influenced heaviness, but this is much heavier than anything else on the label, and definitely much, much darker, too. As soon as Misanthrope(s)'s opening track "Que Des Yeux Vides Et Séchés" blasts forth from the speakers, you can hear the Neurosis influence on the mighty, chugging riffage and tortured screams, but as the song continues to violently wind it's way onward, the increasingly spiteful tone of the vocals and the sheets of dissonant buzzing guitars that coil around the thunderous tribal drums and hypnotic dirgey riffs, and the holocaustal black metal intro of "Toucher Ce Vide Béant Attise Ma Fascination" seamlessly falls into punishing sludge with a truly devastating riff that rises up halfway through, it become clear that Celeste are also drawing deep from the oily black pool of French black metal. The nine songs on this album aren't exceptionally long for this style of atmospheric sludge metal, with most averaging around six minutes, but Celeste create some supremely crushing riff-trances in the time they have, combining grinding downtuned Neurosis-esque crush with the sort of dissonant guitar textures that you'd normally expect from a Glorior Belli or Deathspell Omega album. Like most other bands in this style, Celeste also work in some softer extended instrumental sections that build into explosive crescendos of heaviness (as on "Mais Quel Plaisir De Voir Cette Tête D'enfant Rougir Et Suer" and "La Gorge Ouverte Et Décharnée" - every single song title on Misanthrope(s) is a freakin' mouthful), but even in these more subdued moments, Celeste never get soft, creating tense buildups that put you on edge rather than soothe you with melodic frippery. No, this album keeps it caustic and black as fuck from start to finish, and set the tone with an unremittingly bleak and nihilistic bent to their lyrics, like what Year Of No Light would sound like with their dreamy sludge inverted and drenched in light-devouring malevolence. Clearly, Celeste are shooting for something more than just another attempt at cloning the signature sounds of Neurosis and Isis.
The CD edition of Misanthrope(s) comes in a matte gatefold jacket with a six-panel booklet.
Track Samples:
Sample : Toucher ce vide béant attise ma fascination
Sample : Que des yeux vides et séchés
Sample : Comme pour leurrer les regards et cette odeur de cadavre

CELESTE Misanthrope(s) 2xLP (Denovali) 26.98

Misanthrope(s) IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

Also available as a limited edition double LP from Denovali, this version of Misanthrope(s) comes in a couple of different colors (our choice), three sides of blackened metallic sludge and epic rock with the fourth side sporting eye-popping silkscreened artwork. The vinyl is packaged in a heavy gatefold cover with printed inner sleeves, a really deluxe, killer-looking presentation all around, and limited to a couple hundred copies.
There's something special about how the French are able to take a sound that has been beaten to death - that of the apocalyptic metallic dirge that Neurosis pioneered on their Through Silver In Blood and developed further by Isis over the course of their first few albums - and twist it into something both bleaker, darker, and at the same time elegant and stentorian. Just off of the top of my head, there's Overmars, Year Of No Light, Omega Massif and HKY, four bands who all trace their cyclopean sludge metal sound back to Neurosis's revolutionary art-metal, but who all sound radically different from one another and from the more straightforward music that most of their American peers have been creating. From HKY's cosmic industro-doom psychdirge to the sky-reaching Disintegration worship of Year Of No Light and the blackened avant sludge opera of Overmars, it's obvious that French metallers are some of the best at taking this omnipresent sound and reinventing it in a way that few others are capable of doing.
The latest French band to be added to the list is Celeste, who just released their third album Misanthrope(s) on the excellent German label Denovali, which has brought us a number of quality albums from Daturah, Kodiak, Heirs, and other artful European sludge/metal outfits. Coming from Denovali, I had a hunch that Celeste were going to along the same lines as most of their other releases, which tend to run along the lines of post-rock influenced heaviness, but this is much heavier than anything else on the label, and definitely much, much darker, too. As soon as Misanthrope(s)'s opening track "Que Des Yeux Vides Et Séchés" blasts forth from the speakers, you can hear the Neurosis influence on the mighty, chugging riffage and tortured screams, but as the song continues to violently wind it's way onward, the increasingly spiteful tone of the vocals and the sheets of dissonant buzzing guitars that coil around the thunderous tribal drums and hypnotic dirgey riffs, and the holocaustal black metal intro of "Toucher Ce Vide Béant Attise Ma Fascination" seamlessly falls into punishing sludge with a truly devastating riff that rises up halfway through, it become clear that Celeste are also drawing deep from the oily black pool of French black metal. The nine songs on this album aren't exceptionally long for this style of atmospheric sludge metal, with most averaging around six minutes, but Celeste create some supremely crushing riff-trances in the time they have, combining grinding downtuned Neurosis-esque crush with the sort of dissonant guitar textures that you'd normally expect from a Glorior Belli or Deathspell Omega album. Like most other bands in this style, Celeste also work in some softer extended instrumental sections that build into explosive crescendos of heaviness (as on "Mais Quel Plaisir De Voir Cette Tête D'enfant Rougir Et Suer" and "La Gorge Ouverte Et Décharnée" - every single song title on Misanthrope(s) is a freakin' mouthful), but even in these more subdued moments, Celeste never get soft, creating tense buildups that put you on edge rather than soothe you with melodic frippery. No, this album keeps it caustic and black as fuck from start to finish, and set the tone with an unremittingly bleak and nihilistic bent to their lyrics, like what Year Of No Light would sound like with their dreamy sludge inverted and drenched in light-devouring malevolence. Clearly, Celeste are shooting for something more than just another attempt at cloning the signature sounds of Neurosis and Isis.

Track Samples:
Sample : Toucher ce vide béant attise ma fascination
Sample : Que des yeux vides et séchés
Sample : Comme pour leurrer les regards et cette odeur de cadavre

CORTEGE FUNEBRE / INTO DAGORLAD split CD (Haunted Hotel) 11.98

This split disc from 2005 features two corpse painted French BM crews that share a some members, and both deliver some nicely shredding tracks of Gallic grimness that's got me digging for more records from both. In contrast to the warped avant-garde sounds that I usually hear when spinning any French black metal, Cortege Funebre and Into Dagorlad both go for an older, more classic sound, but with a high degree of riff-chops and songwriting that allow both bands to rise above the hordes of BM rehash.
The first four tracks are from Cortege Funebre, whose cold, droning old school black metal weaves some epic folk melody into their buzzing black swarms, evoking the sounds of both early Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Immortal and the rural majesty of Hate Forest; tracks like "Souffrance mortuaire", "Ultime châtiment" and "La règne de Lucifer" whip up a blackened blast of screeching high pitched screams, ominous droning minor-key riffs, passages of Burzum-esque buzz, and epic melodies swirling in cavernous ambience, moving between walzting dirges and raw swarming swarms, pretty catchy actually, but REALLY raw, too.
With Into Dagorlad, the sound heads into a much thrashier, more bestial assault, songs like "Trones de cendres" and "Cythraul" inciting epic, often seven-minute plus rituals of punky, d-beat ridden blackthrash that draws from a definite Venom influence as well as the likes of Aura Noir, old Darkthrone, Hellhammer, and early French BM, dropping stretches of slower, shambling black dirge into the blazing buzzsaw chaos, and fronted by some killer razor-gargling vokills that are layered into a hysterical screaming din.
And for the last track "Morgue", the members of both bands come together for a four minute slab of abstract buzz, an Abruptum-esque ritual of formless droning darkness, mangled minor key guitar, simple, almost martial drumming, and demonic shrieks and grunts that ends in a cloud of vile utterances and guitar noise. It's a great introduction to both bands, with almost fifty minutes of French necro oozing off this disc. Limited to 500 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : CORTEGE FUNEBRE - Le Regne De Lucifer
Sample : INTO DAGORLAD - Pure Hate
Sample : CORTEGE FUNEBRE + INTO DAGORLAD - Morgue

DARVULIA L'Ombre Malicieuse CD (Battlesk'rs) 11.98

Track Samples:
Sample : LA DERNIERE NUIT D`AVRIL
Sample : POUSSIERE MAUDITE SUR SOL BENI
Sample : SURCIER NECROPHAGE

DARVULIA L'Alliance des Venins CD (Battlesk'rs) 12.98

Back in stock!
If you've been paying attention to the international black metal scene over the past few years, you've no doubt noticed that France has been cultivating an especially fucked-up, furious identity with bands like Deathspell Omega, Blut Aus Nord, Eikenskaden, Mystic Forest, and Diapsiquir all putting their own, unique stamp on ferocious, discordant black metal. Darvulia is another on the list, a two-piece from Toulouse, France that features ex-members of Fornication and Nuit Noire, and whose second full length L'Alliance des Venins summons a strange, hellish swarm of stumbling, droning black metal that nods to both the weirdness of early Ved Buens Ende and Fleurety, and the raw, pitch-black buzzsaw hatred of Vlad Tepes and Mutiilation. A thick swirling black metal blur of bleak, quirky minor-key riffs and depressing droning arpeggios, throaty, growling vocals, chaotic drumming, strange passages where the band sudddenly stops and shifts into a waltzing post-rockish dirge with messy drumming and discordant, mathy guitars; weird sloppy punk rock mid-tempo parts, and a general hypnotic murkiness that has a similiar diseased, psychedelic vibe as USBM outfits Xasthur and Leviathan. Excellent mystic black metal, with cool almost all-black artwork and interesting imagery.
Track Samples:
Sample :
Sample :

DARVULIA Mysticisme Macabre CD (Battlesk'rs) 11.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Le Rituel Des Sept Serpents
Sample : Terre De Nécropole

DEATHSPELL OMEGA Si Monvmentvm Reqvires Circvmspice 2xLP (Norma.Evangelium.Diaboli) 32.98

Si Monvmentvm Reqvires Circvmspice IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

We also now carry the limited edition, deluxe gatefold double LP edition of this masterwork of progressive French black metal that was released by Norma Evangelium Diaboli. Somewhat expensive, but this double LP looks amazing, filled with Deathspell Omega's twisted theological lyricism and their dark, evocative artwork, and also includes a large Deathspell Omega poster.
2004's Si Monvmentvm Reqvires Circvmspice had been out of print for some time before being reissued through Ajna Offensive/Southern Lord, but now this masterpiece of weird, theological black metal is readily available, and we've got it on both CD and a special limited edition double LP release.
Deathspell Omega's third album Si Monvmentvm Reqvires Circvmspice is a high water mark for 21st century progressive black metal, and four years after it's original release, it remains one of the most ferociously groundbreaking albums to come out of the French black metal scene in this decade. Previous releases had showcased a raw, buzzing Satanic blastbeast descended directly from the primitive black metal of Darkthrone, but by the time Deathspell Omega recorded Si Monvmentvm, they became something much different, harnessing the grim unearthly glow of Black Legions outfits like Mutiilation, the progressive tendencies of Leviathan, and the droning midpaced blackness of Burzum. The music is mysterious and otherworldy, filled with hypnotic midpaced tempos and the infrequent blastbeat, weirdly mathy arpeggiated guitar parts that have drawn comparisons to post-rockers Slint, sorrowful but surprisingly memorable riffs, convoluted arrangements and eerie ambient passages, subtle industrial noise, evil croaking vocals, and haunting Gregorian-style chants. A strangely complex and melodic black metal masterpiece. Highly recommended.

DEATHSPELL OMEGA Kenose CD (Southern Lord) 14.98

We'd been hearing all sorts of cool shit about this album for a while, and man, does this not disappoint. This French outfit deliver some of the weirdest, heaviest, most hallucinogenic black metal we've heard since first getting turned onto Blut Aus Nord. Over the course of this 37 minute album (the follow up to their ground-breaking Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice album), Deathspell Omega warps classic black metal shapes into hellish progressive new forms while maintaining an unrelentingly grim and brutal assault. Three tracks of unique, intense outsider blast, with ghostly post-rock spaces and nightmarish ambience building into blasts of buzzing superdistorted minor-key black metal holocaust, insane squalls of blastbeats and creep groans,intoxicated woozy riffing and blood curdling psychedelic drones, unearthly industrial dirge pulsations, haunted melodic arpeggios,total necro attacks, interdimensional doom crawls, a totally hallucinatory and nightmarish assault of psychotropic blackened extremism with moments of unbelieveable beauty. Absolutely fucking awesome, blending powerful avant rock ideas with vicious back metal ferocity. Fans of Ved Buens Ende, Blut Aus Nord, and Enslaved will blow their freaking tops over Kenose. Southern Lord recreated the original releases impressive Digipack packaging design with thick-azz 40-page booklet of creepily beautiful artwork, Biblical texts, and stunning religio-philosophical thought. Highly recommended.

DEATHSPELL OMEGA Chaining The Kacheton CD (Ajna Offensive) 13.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Chaining the Katechon

DEATHSPELL OMEGA Si Monvmentvm Reqvires Circvmspice CD (Ajna Offensive) 14.98

Si Monvmentvm Reqvires Circvmspice IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

2004's Si Monvmentvm Reqvires Circvmspice had been out of print for some time before being reissued through Ajna Offensive/Southern Lord, but now this masterpiece of weird, theological black metal is readily available, and we've got it on both CD and a special limited edition double LP release.
Deathspell Omega's third album Si Monvmentvm Reqvires Circvmspice is a high water mark for 21st century progressive black metal, and four years after it's original release, it remains one of the most ferociously groundbreaking albums to come out of the French black metal scene in this decade. Previous releases had showcased a raw, buzzing Satanic blastbeast descended directly from the primitive black metal of Darkthrone, but by the time Deathspell Omega recorded Si Monvmentvm, they became something much different, harnessing the grim unearthly glow of Black Legions outfits like Mutiilation, the progressive tendencies of Leviathan, and the droning midpaced blackness of Burzum. The music is mysterious and otherworldy, filled with hypnotic midpaced tempos and the infrequent blastbeat, weirdly mathy arpeggiated guitar parts that have drawn comparisons to post-rockers Slint, sorrowful but surprisingly memorable riffs, convoluted arrangements and eerie ambient passages, subtle industrial noise, evil croaking vocals, and haunting Gregorian-style chants. A strangely complex and melodic black metal masterpiece. Highly recommended.

DEATHSPELL OMEGA Mass Grave Aesthetics CD (Norma.Evangelium.Diaboli) 12.98

Mass Grave Aesthetics IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

A reissue of the Deathspell Omega track from the From The Entrails compilation that they shared with Antaeus, Mutiilation, and Malicious Secrets. Yeah, just one song...but what a song! Mass Grave Aesthetics is a twenty minute epic, loaded with insanely complex riffs, eerie post-rock breakdowns, whirlwinds of dissonant guitar noise, sudden time signature changes, ghoulish blackened drones, and those awesome Slint-esque math rock riffs, all wound up in a ferocious avant-garde black metal assault.
Packaged in a deluxe digipack with matte finish and embossed artwork.
Track Samples:
Sample : Mass Grave Aesthetics

DIAMATREGON Blasphemy For Satan CD (Tumult) 13.98

Blasphemy For Satan IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

These French black metallers deliver a ripping, filthy blast of chaotic, skull scraping black metal with Blasphemy For Satan, one of the more intense black metal offerings we just took in from the Tumult back catalog. Sort of similiar to a rawer, more aggressive old Gorgoroth or a faster Vlad Tepes that's been coated in white noise, Diamatregon keep it in the red, their songs ultra saturated in distortion, generally delivered at 1000 mph blasts but occasionally breaking down into a crushing midtempo part or flatlining into crawling sludge. But Diamatregon are also masters of melody, with awesome hooks behind every song making their satanic noisy BM way catchier than you would expect. There's a killer hyperspeed cover of Misfit's "Death Comes Ripping" towards the end, right before the band sinks into an epic 17-minute jam called "The Beast Is Dead" that takes the band through passages of psychedelic drones and Sabbath riffage, weird samples and harsh noise, stumbling noise-doom and black metal marches. The whole album is 45 minutes long, a highly recommended slab of super-catchy, convoluted black metal weirdness and intensity packaged in a bright black and red case.
Track Samples:
Sample : Blasphemy for Satan
Sample : Mystic Death
Sample : Vaticannihilation
Sample : The Beast is Dead

DIAPSIQUIR Virus S.T.N. CD (Necrocosm) 11.98

It took multiple spins of Virus S.T.N. to even begin to get a grasp of what is going on with France's Diapsiquir. The sophomore album from the eclectic post-black metal surrealists is so intricately assembled and disorientating, it is impossible to absorb everything that is going on here in just one sitting. Beginning with the CD package, it's difficult to guess what this is going to sound like: the cover sports a collage of photographs capturing blips of urban contamination and the Diapsiquir logo, which is an awesome-looking, heavily stylized design based on the classic "goat of mendes" image, with the outer ring of the logo inscribed in the words "Seringue Absorption Torture Alienation Nihilisme" (forming the acronym SATAN). Definitely has a black metal vibe, albeit an extremely stylized one. But as soon as the eerie beats and classical sampling of opening track "Incubation" starts the album off, you know this is going to be anything but traditional black metal. Distant, ambient synths and sampled string sections play a recognizeable classical melody over dubby, staticky trip-hop beats and abrasive industrial samplers, the beats constantly shifting as far-off black metal riffs and distant sounds of children screaming appear alongside deep, raspy, sort-of spoken vocals. It's more like an apocalyptic avant-garde trip-hop jam than anything closely resembling black metal. But then "Venin Intemporel, Rouille Universelle, Satan" appears, the title roughly translated as "Timeless Venom, Universal Rust, Satan", opening with a weirdly atonal black metal riff and what sounds like a combination of blasting drum programming and live drumming, as multiple vocalists screech and howl and rant over the percussive thrash before the song turns into a tripped out dirge with glitchy electronic noise layered over another eerie, discordant riff and time-delayed vocals. Then, halfway through the track, it turns into a surreal mashup of Voivod style riffs, crushing breakbeats, damaged French folk music, squawking shrieks trading off with electronically processed vocals and a sort of rhythmic speaking that almost sounds like some kind of mutant French hip hop? Yeah. And it all totally works, because somehow the members of Diapsiquir manage to make their maniacal cacophony extremely evil sounding, imbued with a gleeful misanthropy that seeps from their disorientating song structures. It's even stranger when I saw that Diapsiquir is actually just a duo of a guy named VulgR and Toxik Harmst, who is probably more well known as the guitarist for blasphemous French black metallers Arkhon Infaustus. And this is rooted in black metal...but the vision of black metal here is the industrialized black metal of the grim, post-armageddon urban wastelands inhabited by the likes of Aborym, Mysticum and Dödheimsgard, but even more fucked up and avant-garde and drug-addled, every song a carefully constructed, blackened fever dream of pounding techno beats and grinding Industrial rhythms, powerful, dissonant black/thrash riffs, avant-garde jazz, appropriated themes from both The Godfather and Scarface film scores, hallucinatory electronics, and sudden shifts in style mid-song and weird spoken word parts and tuneless howling. Even the production style of Virus S.T.N. is twisted, using strange mixing techniques and production tricks that sound like they were lifted from an avant-hip hop record. Completely confounding, dreamlike industrial/electro/black metal strangeness; the closest comparison that I can come up with for Virus S.T.N. is a drugged up, black metal Boredoms, or maybe a satanic, breakbeat-heavy fusion of Aborym, Genghis Tron, Mr. Bungle and old-school technical death/thrash, but even weirder than those comparisons would ever suggest, and fully immersed in Diapsiquir's bizarre, satanic urban imagery. It's a fascinating, hypnotic album that demands repeated exploration. Highly recommended to adventurers in the field of futuristic occult metal and psychedelic electro-black metal.

DRASTUS Taphos CD (Flamme Noire) 14.98

Previous releases from this mysterious one-man black metal band from France have been very hard to come by...as a matter of fact, each time we have gotten a title in from Drastus, it's well after the pressing has completely sold out through the label, which means we end up blowing through our copies in short order. We probably owe that to the fact that Drastus' harsh, hypnotic black metal attack is some of the finest that the French label Flamme Noir has offered. This 5 song, twenty minute mini-album delivers the goods, with a relentlessly cold and hateful wall of massively distorted buzzsaw that has a industrial feel to it, each Drastus song a thick dense swirl of white-noise riffing overloaded with a uniquely vicious level of treble, tangles of epic, apocalyptic melodic soloing, weird crooning singing and savage gasoline-guzzling snarls delivered through an array of delay FX, and splattery hyperspeed drum machine blastbeats. Those are some of the fastest fucking blasts I've ever heard from a black metal outfit, regardless of whether or not they employ a drum machine. The blasts are pushed so far into the red that it sounds like gabba noise at times. But there's also some creepy ambience here as well...the instrumental "Columns Of Decline Part I" is nothing more than cascading layers of a malevolent 2-chord riff repeated over and over as it becomes an icy hypno-guitar mantra. But when "Part II" erupts, its a white hot wall of fuzzblast blurr with those machine blasts ricocheting off of Drastus' warped riffs. Awesome, hallucinogenic black metal buzzscapes, suffocating and vicious yet strangely beautiful and hypnotic, like mixing Deathspell Omega with Merzbow levels of white noise and eerie Troum-esque drone.
Track Samples:
Sample : Track 2
Sample : Track 5
Sample : Track 1

EIKENSKADEN There Is No Light At The End Of The Tunnel CD (Blackmetal.com) 11.98

The one man French black metal entity Eikenskaden returns with it's most recent full length,serving up eight tracks of sweeping 'Romantic Black Metal"""", a style that Eikenskaden mastermind Stefan Kozak has pioneered both here and with his Mystic Forest project. I don't know if you could call this a genre as Kozak is (to the best of my limited knowledge) the only person working with this fusion of raw, Burzumic black metal and neo-classical melody, but it's certainly original. Over the course of four albums (including 2001's The Black Laments Symphony on Chanteloup Creations, 2003's The Last Dance on Sacral Productions, and 2004's 665.999 on tUMULt), Eikenskaden has melded an intense and harsh buzzing BM assault to baroque melancholy melodies that seem to be inspired by the likes of Chopin and Debussy, with a wonderful low-fi production lapping at the edges of the songs with crackling, gauzy distortion and hiss. Totally beautiful and catchy, with an atmosphere that you could almost describe as nostalgic, especially with songs like 'Eternity is Not Product By Time', which has one of Kozak's finest melodies ever, but blown out and distorted and grandiose, almost like a classical Xasthur, with subtle shades of pop majesty appearing through the grit and buzz. Highly recommended particularly to those of you that share my affinity for twisted French black metal, this disc comes in a full color package with 12 page booklet that features all of the lyrics.

ETERNAL BLADE, THE self-titled CD (Demysterris) 9.98

Full on bombastic French symphonic electro-black metal a la Cradle Of Filth and Dimmu Borgir, with the added bonus of baroque-meets-early 20th century classical-meets-A.M. easy listening sap, Ren Faire female harmonies, ridiculous Castlevania/Legend Of Zelda nintendotronic keyboard melodies, and sweeping technical axe shred with awesome 80's style, Steve Vai,pop-metal eruptions. Weird, super majestic and atmospheric, and it's sort of a concept album with Chinese mythology themes and named after a Tsui Hark film! It's pretty amazing that this massive, weird black metal/prog/classical/pop opera is the product of just two French guys. Pretty cool!

FUNERALIUM self-titled CD (Total Rust) 11.98

If extremely bleak, corroded doom metal is your preferred audio damage, then I highly suggest you begin checking out the Total Rust catalog, pronto. I dicsovered this Israeli based label at the beginning of the summer when the label head Gad contacted me about stocking his releases through Crucial Blast...and it only took a few minutes of perusing the Total Rust website to realize that this label is indeed putting out the ultra-heavy stuff. Releases from long-time sludgecore faves Negative Reaction and newcomers Mourning Dawn and The Knell had me instantly drooling for Total Rust's entire catalog, and I've been discovering some amazing new stuff like Funeralium. This French band has members of Mourning Dawn and old schoolers Ataraxie, but the sound here is way more stripped down and nasty than either of those outfits...no, Funeralium are extreme doom of the most tortured type, and their six-song, 76 minute debut CD on Total Rust is all lumbering, ultra-bleak steez that's one of the more psychotic sounding takes on extreme doom since Khanate hung up their straitjackets. Funeralium's mangled doom riffs are stretched waaay out over plodding drum strikes, lush buzzing powerchords hanging in the dank between the super slow motion dirge beats while the singer "Marquis" spewing hysterical wailing screams and deep, ogrish grunts. Funeralium's use of feedback is pretty inspired as well, with killer strains of amplifier howl summoned from their cabinets and forged into sheets of ominous drone that floats wraithlike alongside their pounding, depressing dirge doom. It's those crazed, freaked out and expressive vocals that really set this apart though, sounding genuinely tormented, like the demented howls and weeping of a schizophrenic mental patient locked away in a padded cell. Imagine the unhinged suicidal screamathons of Striborg or Abruptum combined with a devestating extreme doom assualt a la Burning Witch, Thorr's Hammer, Moss, Khanate, or Thergothon. Crushing, droning, skullmelting heaviness that batters you into a trance with it's nearly 20-minute song lengths and minimalistic, repetitive riffing, using some interesting breaks into passages of clean guitars and abstract riffs stripped of any distortion, which accentuate the bulldozing heaviness when the serious riffage kicks in. Comes with a thick 16 page booklet filled with lyrics (which will ruin yer day, believe me) and strange, subtly creepy artwork.
Track Samples:
Sample : First Symptoms
Sample : Let People Die
Sample : Light Crisis

FUNERARIUM Noces Chimiques CD (Demysterris) 9.98

Fucked up symphonic French black metal from FUNERARIUM, opening up with majestic epic riffs and soaring melodic synths,insane cackling vocals, and shades of brutal death metal riffing, similiar to CRADLE OF FILTH but more baroque, but as things progress, all sorts of electronic noises and breakbeats and industrial rhythms start creeping in, neo-classical ambience and video game bleeps on top of the hyperspeed symphonic blasting, plus shoegazey guitar parts, weird drowning-goblin vocal noise effects ...and on top of all of that, there are a couple points in Noces Chimiques where the hyperblast black metal suddenly morphs into full on power metal territory, total Dragonforce/Blind Guardian grapefuit-clutching vocals and all, with massively catchy riffs and hooks. A weird mix, but we've gotta admit that it works when these guys drop it on us. Def not for black metal purists, but those of us into epic electro-BM with an Iron Maiden fixation certainly dig this. CD also features enhanced CD-ROM content, including a music video for "Raperta Sapienta" that has FUNERARIUM blasting away in the middle of the woods.

GIAMON The Old Buried Memories CD (Rusty Axe) 9.98

This album has several things going for it before I put it in the stereo - awesome, absolutely indecipherable logo; a proud declaration of their current status as "Gallic Pagan Metal"; a high potential for over-the-top epicness with songs running 11-15 minutes long. It's another recent offering from Rusty Axe too, which almost guarentees that this is going to be some sort of raw, idiosyncratic outsider black metal. This one-man band is the first French black metal project that I've heard from Rusty Axe, I think, which is kinda weird when I think about it considering the label's predilection for fucked-up black metal, which France exports by the bushel. Compared to a lot of the stuff coming out of France lately, Giamon is actually pretty conventional style-wise, playing a brand of majestic, woodland-obsessed black metal filled with epic, regal riffs, folky elements, and furious buzzing guitars. It's closer to the sounds of older Ulver, early Drudkh, and older Forgotten Woods (without the weird psychedelic stuff). Where Giamon takes this sound and turns it into something uniquely his is how he assembles the buzzing, blurred riffs and loping drums into these epic prog-length arrangements that stretch out to over 15 minutes (as on the track "The Essence". Lots of parts, and lots of repeated riffs create a hypnotic atmosphere that works to evoke feelings and images from the rural French countryside, each song immersed in forest worship, the riffs majestic and melodic, drums mostly midpaced, the production is raw and stripped down but everything cuts through clearly, and the vocals are a distant distorted blur, shredded screams and shrieks clouded by the mist of hiss and high end treble that envelops the album. Everyonce in a while, the music erupts into weird blasts of noise, or dark harmonium-like drones, or fades away into long stretches of forest noise, birds chirping and the sound of running water suggesting the sounds of primordial wilderness, but mostly Giamon keeps this stately and hypnotic, letting each epic song unravel in a tapestry of buzzing ambience and trebly folk melodies.
Track Samples:
Sample : GIAMON-The Old Buried Memories
Sample : GIAMON-The Old Buried Memories

GLORIOR BELLI Manifesting The Raging Beast LP (Southern Lord) 15.98

Just found some of the last copies of this French black metal ritual from Glorior Belli...
Noone delivers progressive, forward-thinking black metal the way the French do, and I can never get enough French black metal. I'm constantly listening to bands like Alcest, Blut Aus Nord, Spektr, and Deathspell Omega over here, and another French band that I finally hear not long ago that has been equally kicking my ass is Glorior Belli, who released their last album Manifesting The Raging Beast through Southern Lord about a year ago. This band is kind of a French black metal supergroup, made up of members of bands like Merrimack, Obscurus Advocam, Slavian and Black Flame, but if anything, Glorior Belli channels a similiar brand of discordant, dissonant black metal as Deathspell Omega throughout these eight songs. Seriously, Deathspell Omega fans will love these guys. Their sound is filled with a similiar sort of seasick riffery and epic, apocalyptic leads, the guitars lurching through angular mathy riffs and dense highspeed buzz, drums going from full-on blast to strange sputtering mid-paced rhythms and that weird sort of blackened, disorienting Slint-esque mathrock dissonance that really gets them the Deathspell comparison. The songs are complex and intricate, made up of assorted passages of raging blackened thrash and passages of warped post-rock n' chiming melodies and waltzing, discordant doominess, and amazingly catchy melodic lines are strewn all across the songs, making this both as grim and fearsome as Deathspell while injecting the music with a unique melodic quality of their own. And like both Deathspell and Funeral Mist, Glorior Belli have given their album a MASSIVE recording that's way heavier and thicker sounding than most black metal albums, infusing their discordant satanic blasts with a crushing presence. I love this album! It's another essential disc for anyone into the super-raging blackness of Deathspell, Funeral Mist, Katharsis, and Watain!
Track Samples:
Sample : From Darkness There Springs Light
Sample : Serpentine Admonition
Sample : Severed from the Self

GLORIOR BELLI Manifesting The Raging Beast CD (Southern Lord) 13.98

Noone delivers progressive, forward-thinking black metal the way the French do, and I can never get enough French black metal. I'm constantly listening to bands like Alcest, Blut Aus Nord, Spektr, and Deathspell Omega over here, and another French band that I finally hear not long ago that has been equally kicking my ass is Glorior Belli, who released their last album Manifesting The Raging Beast through Southern Lord about a year ago. This band is kind of a French black metal supergroup, made up of members of bands like Merrimack, Obscurus Advocam, Slavian and Black Flame, but if anything, Glorior Belli channels a similiar brand of discordant, dissonant black metal as Deathspell Omega throughout these eight songs. Seriously, Deathspell Omega fans will love these guys. Their sound is filled with a similiar sort of seasick riffery and epic, apocalyptic leads, the guitars lurching through angular mathy riffs and dense highspeed buzz, drums going from full-on blast to strange sputtering mid-paced rhythms and that weird sort of blackened, disorienting Slint-esque mathrock dissonance that really gets them the Deathspell comparison. The songs are complex and intricate, made up of assorted passages of raging blackened thrash and passages of warped post-rock n' chiming melodies and waltzing, discordant doominess, and amazingly catchy melodic lines are strewn all across the songs, making this both as grim and fearsome as Deathspell while injecting the music with a unique melodic quality of their own. And like both Deathspell and Funeral Mist, Glorior Belli have given their album a MASSIVE recording that's way heavier and thicker sounding than most black metal albums, infusing their discordant satanic blasts with a crushing presence. I love this album! It's another essential disc for anyone into the super-raging blackness of Deathspell, Funeral Mist, Katharsis, and Watain!
Track Samples:
Sample : From Darkness There Springs Light
Sample : Serpentine Admonition
Sample : Severed from the Self

GORGON The Lady Rides A Black Horse CD (Todestrieb) 11.98

They might not be well known outside of France, but Gorgon were one of the earliest French black metal bands, formed back in 1991 by bandleader and guitarist Christophe Chatelet. Usually when I think of older French black metal, it's the LLN and associated weirdoes that spring to mind, but Gorgon was a couple of years ahead of all of that. For the first few years that they were active, Gorgon only released a handful of demo cassettes, and it wasn't until 1995 that they finally got around to recording and releasing their first album on the Dungeon Records label. The Lady Rides A Black Horse has a very different sound from a lot of the black metal that France was producing back then, with an old-school thrashing black attack influenced by Venom and second wave black metal bands like early Mayhem and Osmose acts Samael and Impaled Nazarene. And it's maniacal sounding stuff, with ferocious blackened thrash riffs and awesome shrieking Burzumic vokills, classic heavy metal gallop infused into the darkness along with murky horror movie soundtrack synthesizers, doom-laden gothic passages, droning dark ambience, and eerie whispered vocals that appear throughout the album. Lots of mid-tempo rocking, too, like on the raging "As A Stone", one of the most rocking and anthemic songs on the album. It was on the excellent blog Cosmic Hearse where I first discovered Gorgon's satanic delirium aboiut a year ago, but since then the UK black metal label Todestrieb has stepped up and re-issued Gorgon's eleven song debut along with two previously unreleased tracks from 1994, and Gorgon's three-song Immortal Horde 7" from 1993, and includes a newly designed booklet filled with images of shirtless young French men splattered in gore, a mascara-smeared young lady wielding a sword, and the complete album lyrics.
Track Samples:
Sample : Immortal Horde
Sample : The Lady Rides A Black Horse
Sample : Tower Of Gargoyles

HEADS OF PAGAN Under The Tall And Darkened Arches 3 INCH CD (Faunasabbatha) 9.98

Under The Tall And Darkened Arches IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

One of the three new limited editioon CD-Rs that we just got in from Faunasabbatha, the awesome and criminimally limited-edition new sublabel of Rural Faune. Rural Faune is itself an amazing little CD-R label based outta France and which is run by our pal Bruno, who shares my adoration of handmade short-run releases for especially noisy drone bands and abstract psychedelia, and his discs from Robedoor and Wolfskull were big faves of mine last year; but as heavy as some of that stuff on Rural Faune was (and is), Bruno decided to start up this new imprint that focuses exclusively on "doom and black metal". Of course, Bruno's idea of what constitutes doom and black metal is kind of warped, and so we get these amazing discs of WTF heaviness that I guess you could call doom or black metal but which actually exist in their own fucked up, bedroom-crafted outsider metal soundworld: tortured abstract deathdoom haunted by the voices of spirits trapped inside a crumbling sanitorium...blackened guitarnoisescapes....doomed funereal piano pieces...and improvised power sludge. Kind of in the same headspace as Campbell Kneale's Battlecruiser imprint. Obviously this is right up my alley, and I'm hoping that we'll be seeing ALOT more from Faunasabbatha in the near future.
Heads Of Pagan are another French duo, using voice, effects, and guitar to construct the 21 minute deathscape "Under The Tall And Darkened Arches", and this is one nasty skullgrind; the piece starts off as a simple ominous riff that drifts over a rhythmic background loop that sounds like a heavily reverb'd guitar being scraped and pounded, with sparse clean guitar notes and haunting little half-melodies being plucked and layered over top. As the track progresses though, it becomes more and more chaotic as distorted feedback and rumbling guitar noise builds into a heavy free-drone, flanging and other FX appearing in the dense murk of layered guitars, and finally turning into this massive undulating industrial sludgedrone, like one of Total's amp-shattering feedback/noise jams colliding with Wolf Eyes in a satanic industrial ritual. Seriosuly heavy rhythmic psych-filth. The 3" CD-R was released in another micro -pressing of 66 copies, and is already sold out from the label - we've got a mere half-dozen copies, and once they're gone, that's it. Packaged in a 3" sleeve with murky skull-encrusted artwork.

MALVEILLANCE L'appel du Neant / Le Froid du Nord CD (New Scream Industry) 11.98

Let's take a look at this new disc that comes to us from the Quebec black metal underground. The cover shows a sepia-toned photograph of a bottle of pills spilling onto the floor. The booklet has more images of pills, held in an outstretched hand, and a huge menacing looking dagger. All look negative enough, but then you flip the case over and yer staring at a photograph of the creep behind Malveillance, standing in front of his bedroom mirror, arm outstretched as he snaps a shot of himself standing there in his pink jockeys like he just climbed out of bed. What could this sound like?
Brutal, minimalistic, skullshredding noisecrust. Vicious, uber-atavistic blackened scumpunk, along the lines of Bone Awl, Akitsa, Wold, Absurd and Ildjarn - that's what you get on L'appel du Neant / Le Froid du Nord, a collection of Malveillance's out-of-print cassettes: Le Froid du Nord from 2005, and 2006's L'appel du Neant, both of which were released on Harsh Brutal Cold Productions. Malveillance put their own spin on that kind of blown out crusty savagery though, even more punk rock and thrashing, simplistic mono-riffing blasted over and over again, slathered in filth and distortion, pounded through trance inducing repetition over pummeling D-beat, Discharge-style drums, the vocals a feral screech. The recording for these cassettes is low-fi and raw, but thick and gnarly and super aggro. Like how Akitsa are like some blasted, blackened version of Oi!, Maleveillance are their crusty hardcore punk cousins, fierce and fucked up. The weirdest thing about this album is the whopping eight Ramones covers that are on here, and one cover of "You're Tripping" by pop punk mainstays The Queers! That might sound counterintuitive, but Malveillance takes these pop punk songs and makes them their own, taking songs like "The KKK Took My Baby Away" and "Commando" and "I Don't Want To Be Learned" and douse 'em in distortion and speed and venom, turning them into thrashing, evil blasts of super catchy necropunk. Even the Queers song sounds totally insane filtered through Malveillance's filth. Awesome. I can't get enough of Malveillance and his blackened trance punk.
Track Samples:
Sample : Commando (Ramones cover)
Sample : Coup Final
Sample : Le Froid du Nord
Sample : MALVEILLANCE-L'appel du Neant / Le Froid du Nord

MALVEILLANCE Insignificance CASSETTE (Tour De Garde) 5.98

There are few bands that have been ripped off as blatantly and as frequently as the mighty UK hardcore troop Discharge, whose early 80's albums basically gave birth to an entire subgenre of punk/metal. You could turn over a rock in just about any city and find at least half a dozen metal-studded bands that are copping Discharge's timeless two-chord riffs and that thunderous gallop known as the "D-beat". The "Dis" sound has been beaten pretty firmly into the ground over the past two decades, but lucklily every once in a while you'll come across a band that takes that sound and does something interesting with it. Like Malveillance, whose music is a nasty, charred-black crustcore rampage from a one-man Quebecois outfit that effectively combines crushing D-beat driven punk with the primitive, noise-pocked filth mantra of Bone Awl. This is a cassette version of Malveillance's Insignificance album, and from what I know, this is the only format that the album has been released in so far. Thirteen tracks of blackened, misanthropic, human hating crust, a scuzzfucked Discharge hardcore throb that reeks of sewage and gobs of "down with people" observations. Each one of these songs is a blast of stampeding D-beat drumming and minimalistic punk riffing, simple one-or-two chord thrash riffs hammered out over and over against the blasting drumming that bores full speed ahead, the howling hateful vocals and music equally drenched in feedback and fuzz and white noise. I immediately think of Bone Awl when listening to Malveillance, but Malveillance is more punk, more D-beat, more thrashing hardcore violence, taking a similiar route to punk-infected black metal aggression but leaning way more towards the crusty, hardcore part of that sound, kinda like Akitsa in a way, but nowhere near as catchy. But Malveillance also locks in on hypnotic, drool-inducing Stoogian repetition in the same way that Bone Awl does, and mixes the album up a little with a couple of tracks of harsh, swirling noise walls, which is something you probably wouldn't expect on a crustcore album. But theres a couple of 'em, brutal, dense tracks of wall noise, swirling maelstroms of distortion and white noise, in the vein The Rita, Cherry Point, etc. So where I might expect a band that is this influenced by Discharge-style hardcore punk to be generic and another D-beat knockoff, I'm actually assaulted by one hell of a ferocious blackened hypno crust attack that's one of the more ferocious bands I've heard so far from the Tour De Garde, Montreal-based black metal/blackened punk underground.

MALVEILLANCE Just Fuck Off CD (Suffering Jesus) 10.98

I fucking love black metal in all of its different forms, from ultra-abstract weirdness to hyperspeed blackened violence and proggy, super complex black metal, but as someone who grew up immersed in hardcore punk, one of my favorite sounds is that of punky, ravenous, ridiculously distorted black metal, bands like Bone Awl, Akitsa, newer Darkthrone, Ash Pool and the like. I can't get enough of this stuff, and Maleveillance from Montreal is one of the best.
The earlier Malveillance albums were more along the lines of melancholic black metal, but something happened between then and Just Fuck Off, the 2006 album from Malveillance. This is where the music changed completely into a stripped-down primitive blackcrust assault, all atavistic hardcore riffing and overdriven distortion, rampaging D-beat drums and scorched misanthropic screams. This album still fucking kills - 22 tracks of feral and fucked up thrashing blackened violence, ripping an unbelievable amount of power out of an economy of riffs, most songs using two tops, just hammering it out over hypnotic Discharge-filtered-through-Darkthrone thrash that lays wastes to everything. Awesome !!
Track Samples:
Sample : Pompes Funèbres
Sample : MALVEILLANCE-Just Fuck Off
Sample : Sans Voix

MELEK-THA + DAPNOM Omnium Finis Imminen 2xCD (Fire Of Fire) 16.98

Like the Nadja double CD we have listed in this week's new arrivals list, Omnium Finis Imminent is another double disc set that has been designed to have both discs played at the same time on different sound systems in order to create a layered quadrophonic listening experience. I was stoked when I heard that Melek-Tha and Dapnom had teamed up to do a release like this, as I've been a fan of both artists for awhile. It took awhile to get the time to do it, but I finally pulled my copy of Omnium out a few hours ago and sat in near-darkness here in my office with both discs synced up and spinning. And let me tell you, it's some pretty creepy shit. Both artists are from France and have ties to the French black metal scene, and the satanic influence of French BM fully permeates the dark industrial ambience of both Melek-Tha and Dapnom. Spun seperately, each disc has a similar sound, deep subterranean drones and ghostly ambience swirled with unsettling spoken word pieces, pounding tribal percussion, swells of distorted low-end, with Melek-Tha coming from a slightly more industrial angle (this is "Supreme Apocalyptik Dark Ritual", after all) while Dapnom (the primary project from the mysterious Meldhkwis, who we have covered here at C-Blast before with his other black-ambient project Aymrev Erkroz Prevre) extrapolates upon both the melted satanic ambience of Moevot and the pure isolationist terror of Lustmord. When played simultaneously on two different sound systems though, this is a breathtaking tumble straight into the pit, with the buzzing of locusts surrounding the echoing pound of ritual drums, hallucinatory electronics intermingling with the horrified whispers of the dead, nocturnal ambience slowly becoming consumed with swells of symphonic strings, each track wall of slowly building sound, a nightmarish vision of hell that threatens to consume the listener. This dual disc performance is extremely impressive, and enthusiasts of black industrial/dark ambience/goat-worshipping grimness should check this out. Limited to 500 copies, and released by Fire Of Fire, a sub-label of black metal powerhouse Ajna Offensive.
Track Samples:
Sample : Track 3

MOURNING DAWN For The Fallen CD (Total Rust) 11.98

The self-titled debut from these Parisian sourpusses wasn't what I was expecting at first when that album had come in; I'd just started carrying the Total Rust label and thought that the label specialized in straightforward extreme doom, but here was this album of tortured, depressive doominess that sounded more like a cross between the surreal suicidal dread of Silencer and Xasthur, and the atmospheric downer doom of Deinonychus and early Katatonia, and it ruled. Mourning Dawn became one of my favorite bands on the label, actually. Now we've got the second full length from 'em, the eight song For The Fallen, and not a whole lot has changed, musically. The music is still an incredibly bleak and sorrowful brand of doomy black metal, with layered tremolo riffs and slow, languid melodies drowned in sadness strewn across the mostly loping mid-tempo dirges that only occasionally lurch into faster blastbeat-ridden sections or stretches of hopeless glacial doom. The songs are fronted by a mix of deep death metal grunting and higher register shrieks that almost reach the piercing heights of Silencer or Bethlehem (this is just one of several albums that came in this week that have that weird, impossibly anguished and high-pitched black shriek, for some reason). A kindred soul makes a guest appearance on the track "The Rivers Flow", which has Jonathan Théry (Funeralium/Bethlehem/Ataraxie) contributing his damned howl to the song's blackened funeral crawl, and "Dead Youth" stands out with it's apocalyptic, war-themed imagery and complex riff arrangements that are shaded by solemn liturgical choirs. Bethlehem, Nortt and Deinonychus fans will have another album to listen to while contemplating the futility of living, but anyone into depressive doom and melancholy black metal should give this (and their first album) a listen, too.
Track Samples:
Sample : In Flanders Fields
Sample : Ashes
Sample : Dead Youth

MUTIILATION Live In Germendorf, Germany DVD-R (Pagan Flames Productions) 11.00

One of the infamous members of the French Black Legions in the early 90's along with bands like Belketre, Vlad Tepes, Mogoutre, Brenoritvrezorkre, Torgeist, Dvnaèbkre and Moëvöt, and responsible for one of the LLN's most outrageously fucked sounding demos, Vampires Of Black Imperial Blood , Mutiilation, like so many of the bands that were affiliated with this weird little scene of satanic French teenagers, has been surrounded by various rumors and speculation throughout their existence. They managed to be the only band from this sect to stick around beyond the 90's, too, but albums have been few and far between, and unfortunately their more recent work hasn't quite captured the same delirious weirdness and extremity of their earlier, skuzzier stuff. Since the band is so under-documented, I jumped at the chance to get a handful of copies of this ultra-low-budget dvd of a live Mutiilation show from 2001; the quality turned out to be about the level of low-fi public access quality footage I had been expecting, but what are you going to do? I don't think that we can look forward to Mutiilation hitting these shores at any point.
This amateur dvd is a grotty, shot-on-video performance from Mutiilation that was filmed during the Under the Black Sun Festival in 2001 in the German countryside outside of Germendorf, and captures the band on stage in the middle of a field in full daylight as a rather confused audience mills around aimlessly during their half-hour set. The band puts on a demented performance in front of the crowd, and despite the aged quality of the video (which doesn't seem to have benefited from any kind of digital remastering or cleanup), it's definitely an entertaining (if inadvertently humorous) document of these French black metallers unleashing their sloppy, ultra-raw corpse-painted LLN insanity beneath the soft glow of the late afternoon sun. There are a couple of different camera angles used so it's not just a boring static shot, and while the audio has the occasional dropout, it's perfectly listenable. Comes in a plastic dvd case.

MYSTIC FOREST Welcome Back In The Forest CD (Oaken Shield) 13.98

Welcome Back In The Forest IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

We absolutely LOVED Mystic Forest's Green Hell, a blasting amalgam of twisted French black metal, blazing neo-classical fretwork, and unbelievable melodies that were stuck in our heads for days.Well, we've got this follow up disc from Mystic Forest, and it rules. Less soaked in white-noise fuzz than Green Hell (which we also carry), and boasting fuller production than previous work, this is still very twisted, very haunting, and ULTRA catchy...which is why we love this French one-man export (Stefan Kozak plays everything in Mystic Forest, and is only augmented by some additional female vocals on this album)! Rooted in grim, fuzzed out Burzum-esque black metal, Mystic Forest also adds soaring darkpop melodies, weird stuttering rhythms and vicious blastbeats, odd jazzy riffs and breaks mixed with absolutely gorgeous, heartbreaking female vocals from Julie Idesheim -think romantic, sad French music played in some smoky lounge in Paris, but buried beneath necro black metal buzz and blastbeats and lightspeed Yngwie-style neo-classical/sad-pop guitar shred ! And the classical element is taken to ridiculous extremes with renditions/interpretations of Chopin and Beethoven!

MYSTIC FOREST Green Hell CD (Chanteloup) 13.98

Green Hell IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

Mystic Forest is the other project of Eikenskaden founder S. Kozak. This CD opens with sounds of birds and the forest and a burbling brook, then quickly erupts into an ear-shredding squall of paper-thin distortion, super catchy Baroque melodies, and a guitar sound that's an overdriven, trebly shred assault that would peel flesh if it wasn't delivering those catchy riffs! Yep, Mystic Forest delivers hooks galore, baroque / classical -inspired pop melodies that are buried beneath that nasty distortion and spastic blastbeats and epic mid-tempo rock parts, with vocals that are just as distorted and freaked out as the guitar sound, if not more so...piercing demonic shrieks and gasps that melt into the fuzzblast while those incredible melodies soar above the static. Add some pretty instrumentals, sounds of rain and forests and waves, and what sounds like a harpsichord...all buried beneath that incredible fuzz attack. Check out the other Mystic Forest titles we have in stock for more excellent French black metal weirdness.

NEO INFERNO 262 Hacking The Holy Code CD (Necrocosm) 12.98

With a lineup that boasts members of some of the French black metal undergrounds fiercest proponents (including Antaeus, Corpus Christii, Hell Militia, Secrets of the Moon and Arkhon Infaustus), you'd naturally expect Neo Inferno 262 to deliver some extremely warped and dissonant evil; you would, however, probably not expect this to be so imminently danceable. These violent French demonravers deliver an ultra-complex form of industrial breakbeat/junglist black metal insanity on their debut Hacking The Holy Code, imperial black metal fused with breakcore, techno, gabber, classic drum n' bass, the hash vokills and crushing magisterial riffs woven together into an intricately assembled tapestry of industrial blast metal. This sort of black metal/electronica/techno experimentation has been going on for years, and Neo Inferno 262 is directly related to the similarly cyber-necro violence of Aborym, Void, Mysticum, Alien Deviant Circus, Dødheimsgard and Axis of Perdition, but few bands have put it all together as seamlessly and as ferociously as Neo Inferno 262. Malevolent, dissonant Deathspell-esque riffs ride on trance inducing waves of distorted jungle breaks; roaring, blackened raver synth lines overlay massive distorted basslines and hellish electronic sound collage; film samples (taken from Pi and Hellraiser among others) are intermingled with recorded newscasts from the Jonestown Massacre and abstract electronic textures; fearsome classical strings burst from panzer-strength apocalyptic speedcore and gabber onslaughts. Ecstatically vicious, there's an infernal logic at work behind the chaotic assembly of brooding Deathspell/Glorior Belli-style black metal and fractured gabber/electronica; sounds a LOT like the newer Dødheimsgard stuff but with a larger focus on extreme Bloody Fist style jungle/breakcore mayhem, and it's also comparable to the bizzaro French electro-BM delirium of Diapsiquir and Alien Deviant Circus. The visuals that accompany this blast of electronic black metal savagery are fucking amazing as well, the digipack and foldout booklet both featuring artwork that's inspired by 20th century Soviet communist proapganda poster art, which ties in to the strange totalitarian references encoded within this album...highly recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : black pulse negativity
Sample : F.A.I.T.H.
Sample : hacking the holy code

NUIT NOIRE Infantile Espieglery CD (Todestrieb) 11.98

I had been hearing about this weird French band for awhile, but nothing prepared me for how terminally weird and catchy this is. A duo of just drums and guitar, playing something that you could sort of call "black metal" but it's not really black metal, even though there are blastbeats galore. The band themselves call it "fäerical blasting punk", and the easiest way to describe Nuit Noire's music is a really low-fi cross between primitive back metal, Rudimentary Peni, with impossibly catchy melodies and a singer named Tenebras who puts out a pouty androgynous yell. Most of the songs on Infantile Espieglery deal with Nuit Noire's obsession with faeries and the faerie world, weird whimsical stuff that gives their music a spectral vibe. Did I say how catchy these songs are? I've been humming "Join Me In The Night" all week. Bizarre, wonderous blastpunk, thrashy and raging, filled to the brim with awesome melodic hooks and blinding fast blastbeats, those awesome whiny vocals that fit so well, bratty vocals from a girl named Emilie that give the songs that she sings on an old school peace punk feel. Definitely a new favorite around here.

OBSCURUS ADVOCAM Verbia Daemonicus CD (Battle Kommand) 11.98

Another killer blast of French black metal, this time courtesy of Battle Kommand, who are continuing to bring the goods with each new release in their catalog. Formed in 2003, Obscurus Advocam is made up of members of established black metal outfits Wolfe, Temple Of Baal, and Glorior Belli; Verbia Daemonicus is the band's debut full length, an intense, surreal vision of existentialist black metal poetry and armageddon visions given form through a dissonant, eerie mid-tempo BM assault that's inflected with the bent, otherworldly weirdness of fellow French acts Blut Aus Nord, Antaeus and Deathspell Omega. The album boasts a powerful, clear production, everything is full and thick and crushing, which serves the album well as the thing that really sets Verbia Daemonicus apart is the way that the band has incorporated bursts of loping, midtempo rock and searing emotional blues-based solos into their doomy, dissonant metal. Those bluesy, soaring guitar solos are freaking transcendent whenever they appear, a la Nachtmystium's Instinct:Decay, and it really makes Obscurus Advocam stand out from their French BM peers. Yeah, there are definitely lots of blazing blastbeats, charred thrash riffage, and torn-throat croaked vocals, as well as a couple of detours into Slint-y post rock that always seem to appear on French BM albums, and dark, droning bowed-metal ambient interludes, but man, the solos on this album just kill it. Another crucial, hallucinatory French BM experience, with awesome bio-horror themed album art from Aurelien Police.

SEKTARISM L'Offrande CD (Insidious Poisoning) 9.98

A single seventeen-minute track of blackened, Satan-worshipping doom called "L'Offrande" (or "The Offering") from France's Sektarism, who debuted with this Ep on the Insidious Poisoning imprint that I just discovered through one of our French suppliers. I have no idea who's in this band, their page on metal-archives.com is pretty barren, but this disc is fucking gnarly sounding. It’s blackened doom, incredibly (ridiculously?) bleak and miserable sounding as the band lumbers through a frequently shapeless doom-dirge that's sometimes crushingly heavy and pummeling, sometimes floating through a squealing cloud of visceral feedback and thunderous amplifier noise that gets into psychedelic out-guitar improve territory at times. These freaks evoke a brand of droning, monotonous crawl with a similar nightmarish ritualistic vibe as bands like Trees, Burning Witch and Bloody Panda, other comparisons might include the suicidal blackened doom of Nortt and black funeral doom weirdoes Senthil, but Sektarism are a bit more fucked-up and psychotic, incorporating elements of black metal into their sound and fronted by a deranged singer who moans and chants and wails like a shaman in the throes of visions, hurling seemingly random blasphemies against the oozing wall of dissonant guitar noise and spacious rumble, with these stretches of howling blackened amp-howl that sounds like the band is wandering into a narcotic haze, with moments that approach Fushitsusha-style guitar destruction. And they aren’t kidding around about their love for Satan; based on my limited grasp of the French language, the lyrics for "L'Offrande" read like poetry for a sacrificial rite. It’s sloppy, stumbling and totally evil psych-doom, way more raw and droning and noisy than the likes of Trees, but just as twisted and creepy sounding.
Track Samples:
Sample : L'Offrande

SILCHARDE Les Tourments De La Charogne CASSETTE (Infernal Kommando) 4.98

SILCHARDE I Love...My Death CASSETTE (Infernal Kommando) 4.98

SORC'HENN Faro: Death Of The Island Sheeps CD-R (Crucial Bliss) 7.98

I've been haunted by the beautifully dark loopscapes of French artist Sorc'henn dating back to first hearing the band on their Harmonium pieces & dead reveries disc released by Faunasabbatha, so we were immensely stoked when Sorc'henn was interested in releasing some more of their music through Crucial Bliss. This new full length features four tracks of Sorc'henn's murky, dreamy drones that stretch out over a misty, grey-washed landscape much like the one pictured on the exterior of Faro's foldout sleeve, a lightless wetland that fades way into the distance, obfuscated by a thick veil of shadow, and the fourth track is additionally notable for being a collaboration between Sorc'henn and members of Portland black metallers L'Acephale and Virginia deathdrone outfit One Lifeless Eye. The first track is essential Sorc'henn, a twenty-one minute dronescape that is mainly made up of a single warbling harmonium loop that repeats over and over and over, as a young woman whispers lines of poetry over top. As minimalist and simple as this is, it's amazingly beautiful, and almost has a My Bloody Valentine-like quality to it, like one of the guitar-feedback ambient parts of Loveless that has been melted and crushed into a misshapen version of the original melody. The second track is a mere four minutes in comparison - a deep, murky field of subterranean rumblings and a distant crackling sound, like a phonograph needle stuck in a run-off groove over crashing waves of distorted tidal thunder and ominous harmonium drones. The next track is basically a continuation of the previous, with those sinister harmonium drones humming over surges of distorted low-end thunder and weird noises that pan from speaker to speaker. The last track, the collaboration between Sorc'henn and members of L'Acephale and One Lifeless Eye, is the longest on the disc at ovr twenty-six minutes. This one is a sprawling expanse of murky black ambience, a slow-swirling fog of muted harmonium notes, oceanic sounds, chirping noises that might be frogs, and hushed, whispered cackles and demonic processed vocals drifting across a vast void of Lustmordian darkness.
Track Samples:
Sample : Dodsdansen, life of an island lad
Sample : Leka met elden
Sample : Enez Varv, Faaro

SPEKTR Near Death Experience CD (Candlelight) 9.98

If you've been paying attention at all lately to the black metal sounds being transmitted from France, you've no doubt noticed the surfacing of a particular aesthetic that focuses more on grim, otherworldly textures and atmosphere than speed or heaviness. And as much as I love both speed and heaviness, there's something about the corrosive, death-shroud ambience that seems to infest the French black metal underground that makes for what is, in my opinion at least, the most compelling, mind-bending black metal in action right now. I've been raving for awhile now about bands like Blut Aus Nord, Drastus, C.Y.T., Haemoth, Antaeus, Deathspell Omega...each one a wholly unique black metal entity speaking it's own diabolical tongue. Spektr is the latest of the French hordes that I've come into contact with, and features a member of the lethal BM outfit Haemoth. Near Death Experience is the duo's second album, a corroded cut -and-paste document of dead voices from behind the wall, a twisted vision of subliminal atmosphere that is almost more of an experimental black/drone album than black metal. It opens with "The Violent Stink of Twitching Terror", the first few moments a series of muted drones, factory clang and distant, almost imperceptible wails, before it implodes into a molten mass of white-noise riff and stuttering blast drums, fragmenting into sudden halting stops and off- kilter rhythm. The mid-paced shambling dirge of "Astral Descent" enters amidst a gust of crackling digital glitches, distorted howls and icy static wind, crawling right into "Climax", a four minute interlude of frozen, nebulous black ambience and deep subterranean power drone. "Phantom Reality" is the longest track on the album at almost 10 minutes in length, another harsh scrapescape of repetitious buried black metal riffage floating deep below gauzy layers of swirling white noise and broken shortwave radio transmissions, as EVP phenomena bleeds through veils of trebly buzzsaw guitars whose tone peels paint on contact. That's followed by "Visualization", another mostly instrumental interlude, this time comprised of deformed speech recordings melted over waves of black amplifier static and blissed out synthesizer clusters. "Whatever the Case May Be" starts off similiar to something from Ulver's more recent electronica output, but then quickly shapeshifts into buzzing black metal chords over a jazzy drumbeat, almost like some kind of blackened noir jazz with razor sharp guitars surfacing every now and then. Another blast of chattering percussion of hellish white noise/black blast follows with "Disturbing Signal"; then another expanse of deathly tomb ambience via "Unio Mystica", which leads directly into the album closer "His Mind Ravaged, His Memory Shattered". A riff similiar to that of the first track, bleak and buzzing, is accompanied by a weird, stumbling polyrhythm that starts to sound almost like a breakbeat from a trip-hop track, lurching underneath the midtempo buzz. The whole album is hypnotic and creepy, a document of nocturnal graveyard activity transmitted on secret frequencies, the garbled found sounds and broken radio transmissions beaming black code from behind the stars, cloaked in death-tripping rusted dub ambience and corpse jazz shuffle. Near Death Experience is a totally abstract, disorientating experience; before I picked the album up, I checked out a bunch of reviews online and it's for sure that this isn't for BM purists uninterested in the formless. But for those that dig taking the descent, this one is fully mesmerizing.
And in addition, this disc also includes CD-ROM content in the form of a video playable on your computer, for a track that doesn't appear on the CD entitled "The Near Death Experiences (The Screen Method)", a pastiche of dark ambient drones and strange, shuffling jazzy drums and cymbals, creeping over a broken Burzum style riff that sinks and surfaces in the blackness, like Bohren And Der Club Of Gore meets Burzum maybe, and then towards the end morphs into a dreamy collage of orchestral strains, mutant voices trying to break through, the sound of tympani pounding out spare marching rhythms. The video footage that accompanies the track is a series of treated images and melted visuals, the images degrading into abstract fields of shadow and threatening forms, utterly beautiful.
Track Samples:
Sample : Astral Descent
Sample : Phantom Reality
Sample : Unio Mystica

STIGMA DIABOLICUM Terror Inside CASSETTE (Infernal Kommando) 5.98

STIGMA DIABOLICUM Terror Inside II CASSETTE (Infernal Kommando) 5.98

TERRODROWN Colonize And Regulate CD (Infernal Kommando) 11.98

Vicious industrial black metal from France that bears some similiarity to another French black metal band that we're big fans of around here, Blut Aus Nord. There's worse bands that you could be compared to, and Terrodrown has a dark, warped sound that reminds me of BAN's The Work Which Transforms God , blending together cold industrial sounds, blazingly fast and dissonant black metal, and ominous otherworldly ambience. Where Terrordrown make their own mark is in the details, using samplers and synthesizers to build a dense, inhuman world of orchestral sound around the hyperfast mechanical blastbeats and whirlwinds of atonal riffage and blackened croaks. Their basic sound draws from classic old school black metal, but it's warped and processed through banks of effects and electronics and programmed beats, a Borg version of frosty Scandinavian blackness. Which compliments the hellish terraformer nightmares and Lovecraftian sci-fi horrors that fill Terrodrown's lyrics. Vocals are harsh and blown out, pushed past the brink of distortion into furious timestretched smears of screeching hatred. Guitars are bent and mangled into dissonant, alien riffs and bizarre atonal melodies, and the programmed drums are way up front in the mix, going from ultrafast blastbeats to herky-jerky fills, and most of all lots of martial snares, snare drums cracking and rolling as if Terrodrown was about to launch into some kind of blackened cosmic war march, the rat-a-tat of the martial marching rhythms appearing all over the album. There are spaced out guitar melodies and stretches of slow moving black drift, huge blasts of Wagnerian orchestral strings, vast swathes of murky dark ambience, majestic film-score keyboards and symphonic samples, bits of grim acoustic guitar melody, brief eruptions of crushing death industrial, haunting piano loops and Hammond-ish keys, and buzzing black metal riffs that are rendered into processed 8-bit melodies. It's wild shit, with vicious drum programming that almost sounds like spastic digital grindcore at times, without losing an ounce of their hellish cosmic blackness. Released late last year on the tiny black metal label Infernal Kommando, this is a killer album of sci-fi obsessed, rhythmically fucked industrial black metal that's especially recommended to fans of Blut Aus Nord's industro-leaning albums seeing as how Colonize And Regulate comes across as a cross between Blut Aus Nord and Grand Declaration Of War=era Mayhem, but you should really check em out if your into any of the following as well: C.Y.T., Aborym, Alien Deviant Circus, Diapsiquir, Dodheimsgard, Spektr, and that sort of futuristic, mechanical blackness. Killer. Limited to 500 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : D-Fence
Sample : Last Carcinogenic Legions
Sample : Vise Of Destruction

UNO ACTU Inexistence CASSETTE (Tour De Garde) 4.98

Haven't gotten too many titles from Tour De Garde in stock in the past, but I'm hoping to change that...last thing we picked up from the cult Canadian black metal label was the blown out blackpunk holocaust of Malveillance's Insignificance cassette, and now we've got something just as blackened and sinister, but also totally different: Uno Actu, a mysterious French Canadian outfit who perform a weird sort of blackened ambience who move through strange interconnected sonic scenes of dreamlike drift and creepy aural events. There is hardly any information out there about this band, and this tape reveals very little about who is behind it (the tape cover only has the strange high-contrast abstract artwork, a track listing and some minimal contact info). Who-or-whatever Uno Actu is, the sounds that emerge from this tape are amazing, a kind of creepy ritualistic shadowdrift, each side of the tape holding open an portal onto an abstract realm of slowly shifting drones and deep reverberating thrum, far-off tribal drums pounding in strange rhythmic patterns, swells of epic, minor key orchestral sound, sudden bursts of screeching power electronics, lush swathes of metallic shimmering cymbals that echo across Uno Actu's vast black expanse, muted foghorn tones and slithering tendrils of distortion. Occasionally there will appear some distorted fragments of abstract black metal in the form of stillborn riffs and infuriated distorted vocals that bleed through the murky blackened dronescape, and these moments are fierce and deranged, but only last for a brief moment before being subsumed back into the spacious black drift. This is an eerie, dreamlike world of strange sonic shadows, somewhat similiar to the Black Legions ambient project Moevot at times, or the atmospheric improv-blackness of early Emit. Limited to 500 copies, each one hand numbered.

UNO ACTU L'eveil de l'ombre CD-R (Symbolic Productions) 9.98

The Inexistence cassette from Uno Actu that came through here last year introduced me to the strangest of all of the bands associated with the bizarre French Canadian black metal sect surrounding the Tour De Garde label. Finding anything else from Uno Actu had been a no-go up until just recently, when I found out that French black metal label Infernal Kommando had released a cd-r reissue of the very first Uno Actu demo through their experimental side-label Symbolic Productions, a ten-track disc that first came out back in 2003, reissued here with two previously unavailable tracks, and containing even stranger sounds than I had been expecting. The strange percussive sounds and pitch-black subterranean atmosphere of the tape is again found here, but there's also a lot of oddball black metal vocalization, warped melodic elements, and keyboards that sometimes makes this sound like a stripped-down, necro Za Frumi.
The disc opens with the bizarre black-pit ambience of "De L'Incree", a rumbling, groaning mass of creepy kosmiche synth and random percussive clatter n' thunder from someone playing tympani and cymbals, while snarling black metal vocals rant and drool over top. But then the album's most surprising moment appears in the second track, "Chute Astrale". The track opens with a blurr of blown-out guitar screech that suggests that the band is about to blast off into some super distorted black metal, but this dissipates almost immediately as a male voice enters with a drunken liturgical chant, and then suddenly it turns into an actual song, with blurry, super-distorted guitars and xylophones (!) coming together and playing a demented, slightly out-of-tune melody that's nonetheless very pretty and catchy, almost sounding like something you'd hear on a Mercury Rev album but filtered through Uno Actu's bizarre blackened murkiness, and surrounded by snarling demonic vocals, clattery percussion and thunderous tympani-like rumbles. It's short but super catchy, a twisted bit of blackened indie-pop melody surfacing from a black pit of amp noise and tape hiss.
For the rest of the disc, we come across more fragmented bits of melody here and there, but these are scattered among more abstract and droning pieces of blackened improvisation. There's bellowing black ambience and atonal piano that drifts across the abyssal emptiness of "Machen", and the sickening treble-loaded black metal riffing and minimal piano throb of the title track, where skeletal low-fi BM is littered across a backdrop of grimy old-school industrial atmosphere. More of these industrial textures show up in "Corps Confundis", with creepy acoustic folk and dour spoken word (in French, bien entendu) and gasping goblin voices lurking in the background, joined by a pulsating industrial beat that enter after a minute along with distorted minor key guitars, turning this into a lurching blat of psychedelic dirge with wailing acid leads searing the surface.
"Grimoires Chtoniens" is a low-fi, almost kraut-rock informed doomdirge, with super fuzzed out, washed-out blackened guitars hovering over what sound like tambourines and marching snares, a plodding rhythmic percussive jam smeared with gargling black metal vocals and everything covered in cobwebs of speaker fuzz and echo, like Abruptum meets Silvester Anfang. "Ce Monde N'eriste Pas" opens with waves of heavy feedback that become more and more distorted, slowly growing in volume and density as more layers of aural grit and white noise appear, heavy blasts of distortion buffeting the speakers, the sound turning into a dense cloud of ominous guitar feedback and noise churning out blackened drones. The next track is much quieter, with funereal organ tones drifting over rumbling black ambience and minimal synths, a simple ominous melody that repeats over and over, evoking total sorrow and hopelessness, the dark ambience interrupted only by distant clattering sounds. And the final track "De La Terreur" returns to more black metal-esque territory, but still completely abstract and strange, of course; a trebly evil minor-key melody played on something that almost sounds like a super distorted and processed harpsichord, while immense kettledrums rumble in the background and screeching, snarling blackened vocals swoop overhead.
These early recordings from Uno Actu reveal a more eclectic side that wasn't as apparent in the thick black curtains of ambient noise and deformed black metal riffing on their Inexistence cassette. Still totally mysterious and dreamlike and steeped in weird evil atmosphere, though, and if you're a fan of their other releases, this is equally out-there, a series of twisted necro-improv ambient death-rituals whose clostest reference points are Emit and Abruptum at their most atmopsheric and abstract.
The disc is packaged in a standard jewel case with a simple insert cover, with light red paint on the actual face of the disc.
Track Samples:
Sample : Ce monde n'existe pas
Sample : De La Terreur
Sample : De l'incrée
Sample : Grimoires chtoniens

UTLAGR Traditions Normandes CD (Paradigms) 11.98

More ripping black metal from the Paradigms series, following up that recent killer Throne Of Katarsis CD. Utlagr deliver epic, majestic Scandanavian style black metal in the vein of Mayhem, Immortal, and early Satyricon, only Utlagr aren't Scandinavian, they're French Canadian, and their music is a pagan tribute to Rolfr Utlagr, the founder of Normandy ! It's a scorched earth blast of killer triumphant riffs and pestilent NWOBHM hooks, apocalyptic acoustic guitars swept away into a sea of buzzing blastbeats and grim, frosty black metal. Killer stuff that fans of the recent slate of scorched black n' roll albums from Craft and Negator would probably dig. Limited edition of 750, with the disc and insert contained in a Paradigms series full-color card sleeve wallet that is sealed inside of a hand-stamped presentation envelope. Recommended!

ZARACH'BAAL'THARAGH Real Life Evil Dream CASSETTE (Infernal Kommando) 5.98

ZARACH'BAAL'THARAGH Eternal Darkness CD (At War With False Noise) 11.98

The first black metal album to be released on At War With False Noise, and as would be expected, it's a weird one. Sounding like the gutteral expectorant of a Cthulhu high priest, Zarach'Baal'Tharagh is a French black metaller that has been releasing a ridiculously massive body of work over the past few years; I checked out one list of his recordings online and it looks like the guy has self-released something like fifty-nine demos under the ZBT name, with more on the way. This uber-prolific approach to home recording actually reaches back to the early 1980's, when the guy behind ZBT was doing an early home-taped bedroom metal project called Skull Face that started in 1983! As Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, though, the sound is total black metal, albeit of the most damaged, stumbling and noisy variety. This full length CD is a collection of out-of-print demo tracks, and all of this stuff is raw, ultra ULTRA low fi black metal, divided into three sections: the Primitive Era demo is four tracks of shambolic black blurr, heavily reverbed guitar mixed way up front with repetitious dirgey riffs, a drum machine that sounds surprisingly natural blasting away chaotically in the background, and harsh noisy vocals that come out a total blurr of hiss and distortion. The Apocalypse demo starts and ends with weird psychedelic synth pieces, but in between it's an insane black metal clusterfuck. These songs are almost totally drowned in reverb and sound like they could well be improvised. Everything is covered in reverb, the guitars, vocals, drums, everything, the drums are so spaced out that they barely sound like drumbeats at all, riffs go totally nowhere, songs just seem to uncoil at random. It's fucking awesome if you've got a taste for ultra bizarre, fucked up and dubby black metal noise....imagine an even noisier, low-fi version of Abruptum playing primitive blackthrash. And the guitar soloing on some of these songs, like the appropriately titled "Chaos" are beyond insane.
The last third of this collection features the El Borak demo, and again the tone of the music changes somewhat. There's a higher concept at work here, with the songs titled "El Borak", "El Borak Pact", "El Borak Nightmare Uncut", and "El Borak Outro", but I have no idea what the story is there. These songs do, however, rip my face off with riff after glorious riff of PCP fueled blackened thrash over an almost nonexistent drum machine - seriously, it's buried s low that these almost sound like guitar instrumentals - all the while ZBT shreds his formless, in-the-red solos into infinity.
It's inept and ferocious, filthy and furious, a total catastrophe of recording technique and song structure, and total genius. Zarach'Baal'Tharagh charts the formerly invisible lines connecting the deranged outsider black metal of Tjolgtjar and Striborg and the tremelo slicing reverb-seas of the infamous Les Legiones Noires.
Track Samples:
Sample : zarachbaaltharagh_primitiveera
Sample : zarachbaaltharagh_elborakpact
Sample : zarachbaaltharagh_totalapocalypse

ZARACH'BAAL'THARAGH Skull Face Exhumations CASSETTE (Infernal Kommando) 5.98

We've picked up a bunch of different cassettes from the French black metal label Infernal Kommand for Crucial Blast, all of 'em filled with weird and freaked out occult black metal mutations and queasy psychedelic ambience scraped from the underbelly of the French BM underground. Some of the tapes that we've been able to get are from familiar freakazoids (like the brilliantly fucked one man black metal of Zarach'Baal'Tharagh), while others are new discoveries, from the pitch-black void-ambience of Aymrev Erkroz Prevre and the ritual industrial murk of Stigma Diabolicum, to the sadistic satanic power electronic/crypt-drone rites of Silcharde, Malvoisie's bizarre didgeridoo-fueled black metal hallucinations and the perverted blackgrind overload of Kratornas. All of this stuff is brilliant and fucked, the sort of damaged outsider black metal weirdness that we lust for constantly, and fellow fans of all things blackened and noisy and abstract should definitely check all of these titles out.
The bulk of the cassettes that we got from Infernal Kommando are from that one man black metal project known as Zarach'Baal'Tharagh. I found out about Zarach'Baal'Tharagh after we picked up that collection of demos that At War With False Noise put out on cd a while back, and ever since then I've been looking for more of ZBT's utterly brain-damaged primitive black metal psychosis. The guy behind ZBT, Luc Mertz, has got to be one of the most prolific loner black metallers ever; according to Metal-archives.com, he's up to eighty demos as of this moment, with more surely on the way, and whats really wild is that so far everything that I've heard from this self-described " French master of bedroom black metal" has been amazing (and amazingly bizarre). This is exactly the sort of uber-fucked stumbling low-fi black metal mess that fans (like myself) of Furze, Striborg, Defuntos, Wormsblood, Alkerdeel, Raw Hatred and Tjolgtjar lust for.
Here's "demo 49" in ZBT's colossal catalog of cassettes, a twenty-two track tape titled Skull Face Exhumations that was released in 2006 on Infernal Kommando. Each track is referred to as an "Exhumation", and these are some of ZBT's harshest recordings - skuzzy, super low-fi bursts of damaged atonal black metal riffing and screeching reptilian vocals over shambling blastbeats that are buried way back in the mix, a minimal barely-perceptible clang like someone's banging on a couple of oil drums half a mile away while insanely out-of-tune blackened riffs loop over and over. This stuff is then alternated with passages of pure old school industrial noise in the form of warbling feedback loops, clanking machine rhythms obscured by layers of grime and tape murk, swooping oscillator freakouts, and other weird electronic noises. Like some of Zarach'Baal'Tharagh's other tapes, this has the feel of hearing some diseased nth generation black metal demo taped over an old RRRecords noise cassette, the nauseous riffs and ridiculous high-pitched screams (almost like the bizarre pterodactyl screams from the old Fleurety demo) enmeshed with creepy minimal machine sounds and corroded aural grit.
Track Samples:
Sample : Skull Face Exhumations

ZARACH'BAAL'THARAGH Dementia CASSETTE (Infernal Kommando) 5.98

We've picked up a bunch of different cassettes from the French black metal label Infernal Kommand for Crucial Blast, all of 'em filled with weird and freaked out occult black metal mutations and queasy psychedelic ambience scraped from the underbelly of the French BM underground. Some of the tapes that we've been able to get are from familiar freakazoids (like the brilliantly fucked one man black metal of Zarach'Baal'Tharagh), while others are new discoveries, from the pitch-black void-ambience of Aymrev Erkroz Prevre and the ritual industrial murk of Stigma Diabolicum, to the sadistic satanic power electronic/crypt-drone rites of Silcharde, Malvoisie's bizarre didgeridoo-fueled black metal hallucinations and the perverted blackgrind overload of Kratornas. All of this stuff is brilliant and fucked, the sort of damaged outsider black metal weirdness that we lust for constantly, and fellow fans of all things blackened and noisy and abstract should definitely check all of these titles out.
The bulk of the cassettes that we got from Infernal Kommando are from that one man black metal project known as Zarach'Baal'Tharagh. I found out about Zarach'Baal'Tharagh after we picked up that collection of demos that At War With False Noise put out on cd a while back, and ever since then I've been looking for more of ZBT's utterly brain-damaged primitive black metal psychosis. The guy behind ZBT, Luc Mertz, has got to be one of the most prolific loner black metallers ever; according to Metal-archives.com, he's up to eighty demos as of this moment, with more surely on the way, and whats really wild is that so far everything that I've heard from this self-described " French master of bedroom black metal" has been amazing (and amazingly bizarre). This is exactly the sort of uber-fucked stumbling low-fi black metal mess that fans (like myself) of Furze, Striborg, Defuntos, Wormsblood, Alkerdeel, Raw Hatred and Tjolgtjar lust for.
This 2006 cassette is the 38th "demo' from this uber-cult French black metal project, and it's as damaged and inebraited as the rest of the Zarach'Baal'Tharagh catalog. A single song titled "Dementia" that stretches out for more than 46 minutes, recorded low fi and skuzzy, the primtive recording swamped in murky production and tape hiss, but underneath all of that skuzz is a constantly evolving black metal epic that moves from abstract out-of-tune black dirge to punky mid-paced thrash, sprawling filthy ambience and ripping psychedelic leads, with Zarach'Baal'Tharagh mastermind Luc Mertz unleashing his oddball mix of pterodactyl screams and gargling vocals over it all. It's as if there are twenty different songs in here all glommed together into a single stinking pile of brain-damaged bedroom black metal. The recording sounds like it was probably mostly improvised, and the music meanders from one part to another, but as messy and chaotic and whacked out as this most definitely is, the genius of Zarach'Baal'Tharagh also means that the riffs are killer, the atmosphere is truly diseased, and listening to this black-psych epic is like crawling through an infernal scrapyard of slow dreamlike dirge, messed-up psychedelic leads and vocals that almost sound like Gibby Haynes from Butthole Surfers at times, stumbling blackpunk hypnosis, vast pits of reverby vocal noise and overloaded FX, everything clouded by the murky low-fi production but when it slips into one of those blackened grooves, it's fucking awesome.
Track Samples:
Sample : Dementia

ZARACH'BAAL'THARAGH Porn Of The Dead/Hate/Lunatic Improvised Rehearsal CASSETTE (Infernal Kommando) 5.98

We've picked up a bunch of different cassettes from the French black metal label Infernal Kommand for Crucial Blast, all of 'em filled with weird and freaked out occult black metal mutations and queasy psychedelic ambience scraped from the underbelly of the French BM underground. Some of the tapes that we've been able to get are from familiar freakazoids (like the brilliantly fucked one man black metal of Zarach'Baal'Tharagh), while others are new discoveries, from the pitch-black void-ambience of Aymrev Erkroz Prevre and the ritual industrial murk of Stigma Diabolicum, to the sadistic satanic power electronic/crypt-drone rites of Silcharde, Malvoisie's bizarre didgeridoo-fueled black metal hallucinations and the perverted blackgrind overload of Kratornas. All of this stuff is brilliant and fucked, the sort of damaged outsider black metal weirdness that we lust for constantly, and fellow fans of all things blackened and noisy and abstract should definitely check all of these titles out.
The bulk of the cassettes that we got from Infernal Kommando are from that one man black metal project known as Zarach'Baal'Tharagh. I found out about Zarach'Baal'Tharagh after we picked up that collection of demos that At War With False Noise put out on cd a while back, and ever since then I've been looking for more of ZBT's utterly brain-damaged primitive black metal psychosis. The guy behind ZBT, Luc Mertz, has got to be one of the most prolific loner black metallers ever; according to Metal-archives.com, he's up to eighty demos as of this moment, with more surely on the way, and whats really wild is that so far everything that I've heard from this self-described " French master of bedroom black metal" has been amazing (and amazingly bizarre). This is exactly the sort of uber-fucked stumbling low-fi black metal mess that fans (like myself) of Furze, Striborg, Defuntos, Wormsblood, Alkerdeel, Raw Hatred and Tjolgtjar lust for.
This cassette is a collections of a couple of different Zarach'Baal'Tharagh that had previously been released. Collected here are the Porn Of The Dead demo, the Hate cassette, and the Lunatic Improvised Rehearsal, all originally released between 2006 and 2007. The Porn Of The Dead material consists of siix tracks of some of the most far-out and noise damaged ZBT material that I've heard so far, which is really saying something. Actually, these tracks are only marginally "black metal" - there's minimal mosquito riffing and weird flanged-out screaming, but it's all smothered in harsh oscillating tones, murky Abruptum-esque dungeon clatter, and orgasmic groans and cricket-like chirping looped into surreal, bestial soundscapes. Way closer to low-fi industrial soundscapes than anything resembling black metal.
The Hate demo is actually the same tracks that appeared on the split with blacknoize thrashers DOG (whose 3" CD on Autopsy Kitchen we just reviwed/listed in last week's new arrivals list). Again, this stuff is more like some kind of psychedelic blacknoise industrial freakout than "metal", with six tracks of raw, repetitious deformed riffing and meandering Butthole Surfers-like acid guitar over murky black ambience, samples and field recordings, tortured screams and looped moaning, clanging minimal percussion...it's alot like Abruptum, but steeped in an ultra lo-fi cruddiness that sounds like someone recorded a bunch of awesome black metal thrash riffs over a disintegrating RRRecords noise cassette on a malfunctioning ghetto blaster. I'm not going near this stuff again until I've managed to get my hands on some choice blotter...
On the flipside, the Lunatic Improvised Rehearsal stuff is equally freaked. Despite it's title these tracks really don't sound any more improvised than anything else that ZBT has released, but I'll take his word for it. It starts off with "Lunacy", an almost a capella nigtmare of raging thrash riffs and choked super-distorted screams that cycle over an empty, drumless void, then moves on to the noisy Motorhead-like jam "Unfriendly" that suddenly turns toxic when the guitar plummets out of tune fifteen seconds in as those insane reptilian shrieks swoop overhead. The rest of these seven tracks likewise tread between gnarly repetitious blackened punk riffs and stumbling midpaced drumming and more abstract blacknoise wig-outs, at times remind me of a cross between Abruptum and a tenth-generation bootleg Bone Awl cassette that someone just peeled off the bottom of a dumpster.
Track Samples:
Sample : Side 2
Sample : Track 2

ZARACH'BAAL'THARAGH The Nightmares Continues CD-R (Infernal Kommando) 9.98

This nightmare of putrescent psychedelic spew released in 2007 from French basement-blackmetal mutant Zarach Baal Tharagh may be a bit more structured than some of those utterly fucked cassette releases of his that we got in stock a few weeks back, but this is still completely brain-damaged black metal and blackened noise that's rotten to the core. Titled The Nightmare Continues and featuring "Demo #57" from Luc Mertz's (aka Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, natch) archives. When does this guy sleep?
Eleven tracks labeled simply #334-#344 that run the gamut of ZBT's mongoloid necro attack, starting with a brief bit of ghostly groans, metallic clatter, and weird industrial ambience that soon gives way to a gnarly low-fi thrash metal assault, huge blasting drums and primitive, nay, brain-damaged blackpunk riffing and those reverb-drenched vomit vocals give this a semblance of being actual black metal for a minute or so, but then devolves into a weird almost no-wave dirge as Mertz's starts strangling his guitar and coughing up chunks of lung matter, then - BLAM - the blastbeats erupt again for a second, then the music lurches into a mangled stop/start rock groove before totally falling apart into a heap at the end. The next track is pure murky black ambience, hissing drones and effects-baked chanting floating around in a collapsing cathedral, then kicks into the insane blackpunk frenzy of "Nightmare #337", which sounds like an even sloppier than usual Darkthrone jam with those swooping pterodactly shrieks off of the first Fleurety demo. Halfway through, Mertz starts splattering the song with insane in-the-red soloing, and then, as usual, collapses into stumbling noise rock at the end.
The rest of the album follows the pattern of alternating grisly industrial tableaus with mangled low-fi blackpunk. Some of the tracks sound like Wolf Eyes or Throbbing Gristle slowed down to 4 bpm, or processionals of trolls performing Gregorian chants at the bottom of a cistern, or the droning wail of air-raid sirens muffled by the horrified screams of your neighbors and the down pillow you have pulled over your head...while the black "metal" tracks are all equally damaged and sloppy and mind-bending, making early Beherit sound like fucking Dragonforce in comparison. Of course, I think this stuff is KILLER, especially whenever Mertz decided to "rock out" and the song lurchers into this bizarre bluesy rock or old school pub-punk with hilariously tuneless soloing that is obviously insanely out of place coming right after a hyperspeed blast of sub-Darkthrone thrash. Goddammit, I love this band. So will you if yer into the crazed and demented black metal weirdness of Furze, Striborg, Defuntos, Wormsblood, Alkerdeel, Raw Hatred and Tjolgtjar.

ZARACH'BAAL'THARAGH Metal Bastard CASSETTE (Infernal Kommando) 5.98

We've picked up a bunch of different cassettes from the French black metal label Infernal Kommand for Crucial Blast, all of 'em filled with weird and freaked out occult black metal mutations and queasy psychedelic ambience scraped from the underbelly of the French BM underground. Some of the tapes that we've been able to get are from familiar freakazoids (like the brilliantly fucked one man black metal of Zarach'Baal'Tharagh), while others are new discoveries, from the pitch-black void-ambience of Aymrev Erkroz Prevre and the ritual industrial murk of Stigma Diabolicum, to the sadistic satanic power electronic/crypt-drone rites of Silcharde, Malvoisie's bizarre didgeridoo-fueled black metal hallucinations and the perverted blackgrind overload of Kratornas. All of this stuff is brilliant and fucked, the sort of damaged outsider black metal weirdness that we lust for constantly, and fellow fans of all things blackened and noisy and abstract should definitely check all of these titles out.
The bulk of the cassettes that we got from Infernal Kommando are from that one man black metal project known as Zarach'Baal'Tharagh. I found out about Zarach'Baal'Tharagh after we picked up that collection of demos that At War With False Noise put out on cd a while back, and ever since then I've been looking for more of ZBT's utterly brain-damaged primitive black metal psychosis. The guy behind ZBT, Luc Mertz, has got to be one of the most prolific loner black metallers ever; according to Metal-archives.com, he's up to eighty demos as of this moment, with more surely on the way, and whats really wild is that so far everything that I've heard from this self-described " French master of bedroom black metal" has been amazing (and amazingly bizarre). This is exactly the sort of uber-fucked stumbling low-fi black metal mess that fans (like myself) of Furze, Striborg, Defuntos, Wormsblood, Alkerdeel, Raw Hatred and Tjolgtjar lust for.
I'm a big fan of ZBT's damaged black metal slop, both the noisy industrial-laced blacknoise experiments and the more riff-centric retardo blackthrash stuff, but it's when Zarach'Baal'Tharagh launches into the noxious, gnarly blackened punk that this one-man black metal band really rages. This 2006 cassette on Infernal Kommando is the most blackpunk-focused of all of the ZBT tapes that we just picked up from them, a six song collection ("Dark City", "Suck Your Bone", "Metal Bastard", "Hellmaster", "From Beyond", "Deadly Pale Face") that pays homage to Motorhead through raw, stumbling midpaced gruesomeness that combines simple three and four chord riffs with those distant trashcan drums and Luc Mertz's fucked up slobbering growls and swooping reptile screams, sounding alot like a totally drunk and wasted Venom recorded on a busted Tandy tape deck. Beneath the roiling tape hiss and the skummy sheen of the shitty production, this stuff is raging, definitely for fans of the really mangled end of the current wave of blackened noisepunk bands like Malveillance and Bone Awl and Ancestors. This being Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, there's alos lots of weirdness going on, swells of psychedelic fx, vocals warped into tea-kettle whistles, deep chanting that kinda sounds like Tuvan throat singing, weird dissonant chords, and lots of hideous blackened noise. It's the most "rocking" of all of the ZBT tapes we have though, that's for sure.
Track Samples:
Sample : Track 2
Sample : Track 4

ZARACH'BAAL'THARAGH / THE DEAD MUSICIAN split LP (213 Records) 14.98

You've heard it here before a hundred times over: When it comes to black metal, nobody does it like the French. Just flip through the Crucial Blast webstore - you'll find a shitload of my infatuated rambling over the sleek, dissonant avant-garde black metal of bands like Deathspell Omega and the warped industrial weirdness of Blut Aus Nord and Spektr. So many of these French black metal bands have becoming pretty well known outside of their homeland over the past couple of years too, but there's another, lesser known corner of the French black metal underground, a slimy underside that you only find if you turn the rock over, a small cadre of bands rooted in a down and dirty bedroom-grade recording aesthetic, a punky primitive DIY rawness and some truly bizarre self-created mythologies that these weirdos tend to follow straight into a state of dementia. Nuit Noire for instance, the fairy-obsessed werirdos who refer to themselves as "Faerical blasting blackened punk" and sound like a grim, blastbeat ridden version of Rudimentary Peni. And then there is Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, a one-man black metal project who plays some of the most fucked-up, damaged low-fi black metal I've ever heard, who I first discovered on that CD of demo tracks that At war With False Noise put out a while back. This tongue-knotting band has produced a ridiculous number of demo cassettes for more than a decade, obsessively documenting his brand of incredibly noxious, nihilistic black metal slop that goes way beyond brain-damage...if yer into the whole ultra-zonked, fucked up and damaged black metal aesthetic that we champion around here, bands like Tjolgtjar, Furze, Striborg, Alkerdeel, Bone Awl, Ancestors, etc., etc., then you really need to hear this shit. I couldnt wait to get this LP with Zarach'Baal'Tharagh in when 213 Productions told me about it, but that's just half of it - the mighty ZBT shares this slab with another French band called The Dead Musician, who I've never heard of previously and to be honest wasn't expecting much from the goofy band name, but this band turns out to be just as crazed as ZBT, another blast of French whatthefuck blackness that is right at home alongside ZBT's crude blackened mayhem!
The ZBT side opens this up with a single massive track that rolls out for more than 22 minutes, a sprawling psychedelic mess that first takes form as a furious blizzard of sloppy, relentless blastbeats beneath a swirling miasma of fx-drenched hissing, reverb, out of tune riffing, sickly hammered notes, and thick smears of black fuzz. Everything falls apart soon enough, the drums collapsing into a midpaced dirge, dissonant guitar shred flying everywhere, tons of NOISE, those atonal riffs falling apart and coming back together, sometimes forming into skronky punk riffs that sound like Greg Ginn jamming over Abruptum, the drumming veering wildly between a steady throbbing pulse and free-for-all clatter, often just disappearing completely. There are guitar leads everywhere, noodling in and around the doomy splatter and nauseous noisy fug, surrounded by high pitched keening, low-fi murk, retarded stop-start riffing, twisted rhythmic logic, and melting amplifiers. If you think Furze is trippy, get a load of this. Seriously wasted, psychedelic black metal weirdness. This track is titled "Demo 42: The Final Chapter", and first appeared on cassette a couple of years ago. Seriously, Greg Ginn + Abruptum + Quaaludes = total mindfuck.
Like ZBT, The Dead Musician is a French one man band playing extremely low-fi homemade black metal, but instead of an evil demonic figure crouched in a lightless corner of his bedroom crafting bizarre, shapeless black metal epics and occultic psych-noise rituals, The Dead Musician is just a guy named Jeff who plays guitar, uses drum machines and handles all of the vocals to create what he calls "anarcho black punk metal". And this stuff is definitely pretty punk, definitely raw and primitive, and filtered through a twisted song structure logic. The three tracks on his side of the record combine pounding industrial drums and tinny hyperfast blastbeats, discordant guitar shred and doomy riffs, thrashy blackpunk parts and weird fretboard runs that synch up with clusterbomb drum machine blasts. It's kind of like a gnarlier, industrial-tinged Furze maybe, damaged and chaotic, with some killer rocking riffs but totally fucked up atonal solos, Sabbath riffs twisted into angular shapes, and harsh croaking vocals. The last song is a cover of Mayhem's "Freezing Moon", filtered through the cracked prism of The Dead Musician's deranged outsider black metal and splattered with some seriously wonky lead guitar action. Total freakout.
This is limited to 333 copies - the covers all have slightly bent corners, as thats how they arrived here when they were shipped over from France, but the jackets are otherwise fine.