 |
|
October 12, 2008 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This music hates you.
Trading grease paint and bad nineteenth century poetry for faceless anonymity and a gloomy industrial-metal atmosphere that owes more to GODFLESH and SKIN CHAMBER than EMPEROR and MAYHEM, France's BLUT AUS NORD have created something that is for the first time in a long time, grim, not "Grim(tm)", devoid of the gimmicks and cliches that have turned Black Metal into little more than a collection of message board photo shops and 60 dollar reunion concerts. BLUT AUS NORD doesn't care about being "true" or "false", suggesting with their newest release, "Mort", that "true" is the new "false".
The track "Mort" runs through the entire album, split up into eight sections that, while bleeding together perfectly, sound like eight different tracks. It makes me wonder if the band just didn't want to come up with song titles, but that's beside the point. This is slow, heavy, and downright scary music that could darken the sunniest skies with an overcast of bats and locusts.
BLUT AUS NORD are making Black Metal interesting again, taking the repulsive melody and bleakness of the genre's strongest names while blending it with the dense machine music of bands like HALO and RED HARVEST, giving it a smokier, more modern look and feel. This feels like Black Metal that has joined the 21st century, abandoning the medieval imagery that has long since become a parody and instead holding up a mirror to contemporary mankind’s follies and ugliness. It's atmospheric and minimal without being poorly produced; depressing and misanthropic without resorting to burned-church epithets and misguided Viking sword and sorcery. In fact, much like their machine gun war-Metal contemporaries ANAAL NATHRAKH, BLUT AUS NORD seem to have no interest in any sort of Jihad or religious alliance at all. They seem to have contempt for any and all things. It's Black Metal without the B.S.
Looks like Black Metal is getting a second wind; a colder, more cancerous wind.
|
|
|
|
