The Englishman’s reflex for emotional repression is unmatched. But even he will experience particularly challenging periods, periods liable to breed emotions faster than they can be slaughtered. The obnoxiously clement weather mocking any attempts to wallow in peace. In such times, his fine tuned ability to kill emotions in their cradle requires some assistance. For the quiet English metalhead, this kindles a desire for just…fucking…noise. Something to drown out the complex matrix of feelings he is ill equipped to process or understand. And that’s essentially why I’ve been huffing harder stuff lately. Not the hardest stuff by any measure. But there’s a clarity of nihilistic purpose to some of this material that clears the senses, unblocks the system, brings the contours of reality into sharper focus.
The most remarkable thing about Blood is their ability to convey a whole complex of meaning from music that, if studied at the molecular level, appears to be entirely unremarkable deathgrind. The intractable anomie of post industrial society writ large. Its contradictions, hypocrisies, violence, denialism, and surrealism. Listening to them never fails to refocus the mind. The promise of a lot of extreme metal fully realised with little need for lengthy curation. “Thank god”, I think, “thank god there is music out their capable of expressing the confusion, anger, and paralysing agnosticism at the heart of civilisation, of a society capable of self-mythologising its commitment to liberty to such an extent whilst so blatantly inflicting wanton violence on its subjects”.
‘O agios pethane’ remains the pinnacle of Blood’s achievements, and to some extent encapsulates the quandary any writer feels when addressing their material. Basic grindcore lurches supplemented by a brutalist death metal gravitas, in many ways resulting in the ultimate expression of grindcore as the practice of metal in miniature, a series of dense vignettes rich in emotive import yet dazzlingly efficient in their sparsity. Whilst every Blood album has much to recommend it, 2003’s ‘Dysangelium’ came the closest to recapturing the magic of ‘O agios pethane’ through its sharp contrasts of cloying sadistic surrealism and blunt violence.
The early 2000s were a period of great aesthetic homogenisation within extreme metal. Digital recording was becoming the norm, along with gauche photoshopped album covers and a whole armoury of off-the-shelf tools designed to cleanup mixes and stabilise the recording process. A blessing for stretched produces, a blight on artistic variety. Blood were not immune to this. But in many ways ‘Dysangelium’ benefits from its sterile, uniform mix. The dynamic consistency between the threnodic doom segments, barraging d-beats, blasts of grind, or playful grooves, all lends the album an uncaring yet deeply clarifying malevolence. Despite the muscular guitar tone, the sparsity of the mix gives us full visibility of its mechanical exchanges with the drums, something lacking on previous albums.
The importance of Oehler’s vocal eccentricities should also not be underestimated in bringing the Blood formula to bear. The almost comical guttural death growl punctuated by pained high screams, delivered in barbaric call-and-responses or focused unison, echoing Benton’s iconic performance on ‘Legion’. Surveying the effect of this across the album as a whole, combined with the creative simplicity of the tempo changes – and some well selected samples – all brings into sharp relief the absurd moral binaries we are forced to concoct and live by. Lurching helplessly from extremes with little regard for nuance and no effective tools to process reality’s contradictions, we are cast adrift between poles, out of phase with those around as we are split apart before the daily paradox of being.
France’s Antaeus have been a reliable returning character in my rotation for over two decades. Catching them at Brutal Assault in 2019 remains a gigging highlight. They are not only a rare gem of 2000s metal, but are in many ways represent an unrealised creative renewal that was required of black metal if it were to ever successfully metabolise the early years of the new century. 2006 seeing the release of Summoning’s ‘Oath Bound’ and Antaeus’s ‘Blood Libels’ presciently bookending the two extremes of my “type” when it comes to black metal. But for all the polished grace of their third effort, and the dank, chasmic sweat of ‘De Principii Evangelikum’, Antaeus at their purest can only be found on the debut, 2000’s ‘Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan’, the perfect starting gun of the new decade.
The genius of this album is its dual function as a one trick pony of war metal for anyone craving pure sonic violence, smuggling within its underbelly a plethora of developments and additions to the vocabulary of extreme metal. Its marriage of visceral grindcore and a more regal, melodically edged black metal elevates what we should expect of artists working at the intersection of these two competing impulses far beyond anything achieved by war metal itself.
Antaeus do this by implementing a number of tactics deployed at both the technical and the aesthetic level. Listening to their earlier demo ‘Supremacist Dawn’ released back in 1996 reveals an entity much more aligned with the tremolo frigidity of their Nordic counterparts, melodic nuance clearly being a prescient concern for this younger entity. But much of this nuance made it onto the debut, with tracks like ‘Devotee’ and ‘Those With no Eyes’ displaying a simple yet well crafted undercurrent of traditional cadential phrasing. This in turn frames the rampant barbarity of the rhythm section and the latent impulse of the guitars toward expressions of energy unfettered from any restrictions. The non-linear percussive anomie of death metal plays puppeteer in the background, marshalling the transitions from blasting speed to steady mid-paced marches, granting the album a degree of mechanical forethought at work behind the foregrounded raw chaos.
At the aesthetic level, Antaeus renew the darkness of black metal with an artificial indifference. Unlike more direct attempts to marry black metal with industrial however, the influence is passive, a varnish coating the entire album with mechanised hostility as opposed to a more literal form of machined programme music. MkM’s vocals, having not yet developed the guttural edge that would define later works – and indeed the companion project Aosoth – retain a feral, hardcore energy functioning as a welcome balance to the cold, harsh strictures of the music itself. The result is an album – despite appearances – capable of serving multiple functions depending on the needs of the listener. Those seeking a purely physical, primal dose of blackened noise are more then well served by ‘Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan’. But its melodic nuance cannot be underestimated. Nor can its position within the chronology of genre as a tidy cross section of extreme metal styles reaching a point of regeneration within the bowls of this album’s many moving parts. Equally, as an expression of subtly futurist, cold, achingly dark black metal it anticipates – and arguably outdoes – the many attempts to achieve just that in the new century.
Despite numerous expeditions into Krisiun’s by now extensive discography, nothing quite matches the debut ‘Black Force Domain’ for its singular vision and execution. Released in 1995 at the tail end of death metal’s popularity, the entropy of the genre was to bear many strange fruits. The second half of the decade is rarely regarded with fondness. But I maintain that it was perhaps one of the most interesting periods for death metal. Progressive and experimental iterations were reaching a peak of confidence, with even decidedly un-progressive acts like Incantation expanding into a borderline avant-garde version of themselves by the time they inflicted ‘Diabolical Conquest’ on the world. It also witnessed scenes in South America grow into a creative prime, along with the gradual opening up of Eastern Europe seeing an unsung flowering of imaginative death metal (more on that another time).
Whilst it might seem incongruous to lump the rise of Brazil’s Krisiun into this trend, there is something oddly compelling about their nakedly one dimensional take on death metal. A logical throughline of extremity handed down from Slayer, through Sadus, Master, Malevolent Creation, until we arrive the extended blast-beat that is ‘Black Force Domain’. Thrash riffs brought to a simmer and reduced to only the barest rudiments, all joy and whimsy boiled away for the sake of pure, concentrated assaults of violent energy. Guitar leads – one hesitates to call them solos – augment the chaos. Echoing the meandering tangents of Tom G Warrior, they pepper these tracks with reckless freedom, weaving their way between the restrictive rhythmic templates with dazzling abandon. They function more through their manipulation of pitch, phrasing, and rhythm than anything approaching a melodic language.
The stock criticism of an album like this, its shameless lack of variety, is its very strengths. The monotony in both intensity and tempo make it functionally indistinguishable from drone. Riffs that once carried the DNA of a rockist formula via thrash are distilled to a flattened off fuzz of static, any variation in pitch dissolving into white noise. The sheer cheek of it is admirable if nothing else. But for all the respect I have for its intensity and monomaniacal mien, it is a dead end of creativity, the final form of a lineage stretching back to the mid-80s. Beyond this lies only grindcore, or worse, war metal. And for Krisiun, it was an intensity they were unable to sustain on subsequent releases, reaching for a more garden variety form of death metal that, whilst not without merit, lacks the audacity of what they achieved on this early high watermark.