Who could have seen this coming? Album number three sees everyone’s favourite Filipino Antichrist’s changing tack, discovering God and playing Christian rock! Yes of course I’m talking out my hat, their tried and tested brand of Satanic Bestial Metal was created to “attack, destroy and pillage the local underground scene.” It saw them upping sticks and relocating to Costa Rica and releasing their 2006 speaking for itself demo ‘Rapeslay Of The Virgin Mary.’ The rest as they say is history.
I was slightly surprised on putting this on to see that the running time clocked up an impressive 37 minutes and then immediately wondered if this was going to be a bit too much extremity to handle. With the long outro making up the extra time over the half an hour length it is just about bearable for those of us who revel in such unmitigated noisy filth. However if you have heard the band before and run headlong from them screaming in a panic there is no great reason for you to attempt to try them again, progression is not something a band like this go for and you are still going to hate it I can assure you.
Intro: Extermination does as suggested combining apocalyptic sirens with what sounds like a B-Movie Cold War soundtrack sampled and then we are flung straight into ‘Human Race Absolute End.’ Drums are smacked in a primitive and unmerciful fashion, with barely a hint of musicality, bass and guitar grind and coruscate and singer Voltaire 666, howls over the top. This is savage and uncompromising stuff, violent and hateful and as barbaric as music could possibly sound. Of course if you can get beneath the utter quagmire of sound which hits like a deluge of rank sewage you may well yet appreciate the wild guitar solos that flail around in the midst of the madness. One bursts out spring like and uncoils adding a slight harmonic texture to ‘Heretic Oath’ but it hardly resembles a tune that is going to stay with you for any length of time. Satan is I guess lyrically a main theme (I can hardly make out much of the words) and is name checked in three of the song titles alone. At times the destructive force behind songs like ‘Plague And Satan Triumphant’ is so fast it sounds like things are going to implode, at others such as the start of ‘Exalted Hate’ things limber up before attacking in a fist slamming vortex of power and grinding bass breaks.
The only thing really to do is press play and hang on for dear life and see if you make it to the end. If you do it’s kind of a sense of achievement but whether you feel better for the experience or decide that you have snapped and really are now going to step out and actually kill someone is a question that I cannot quite answer. If you feel the urge to snap, this is an album that could certainly help you on the way. It’s kind of funny really when you look at these people that do go out and kill and the press get hold of the fact that they listen to satanic music like Marilyn Manson. If they ever came out with the words ‘he listened to Deiphago,’ I could completely understand it and would laugh when people went to check the band out on the net.
With the stewed nightmarish flailing riffs charging through ‘Atrocities Absurdities’ it is hard not to feel energized by this it certainly makes you feel alive. The title track itself starts with an apocalyptic and doom laden slothfulness compared to all that has come before, you wait for it to explode which it does in style and dashes towards that aforementioned long outro which really does feel like the end of the world.
(7/10 Pete Woods)
Leave a Reply