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Live at the Roxy, London - April 1st & 2nd 1977 is the first CD in the box, capturing two identical sets five months before Wire recorded their debut LP Pink Flag. These are undeniably the "early versions" of some of the songs, as Wire would play them over and over again until they were completely pleased with the songs. Some minor changes were made: tempos and words got modified slightly: "one dimensional man," for example in "Straight Line" became "one dimensional boy" and "Mr. Suit" is noticably faster on the LP. This was a new lineup for Wire, after losing member George Gill, but the band was tight, well-rehearsed and comfortable enough to speak boldly to the audience from the stage in rare terse comments between songs like "If you want it louder, go see the sound man back there," Graham telling the audience to "pay attention," and "12XU" being introduced as a single (yet there's no indication that I can find that it was at the time). Mike Thorne, acting as producer and EMI talent scout managed to get the recordings to become Wire's demo and the rest is history.
The joy in these recordings is that the concerts are completely full and unedited, despite only amounting to about 25 minutes each. Just like the recording of Pink Flag, one song nearly always starts on where the downbeat of the last song just ended would have been, confusing any newbie to their music into wondering where the songs end or begin! Cherry picked from the April 1st date to fill bonus tracks on the 1995 Japanese CD of Pink Flag were "Mary Is a Dyke," "Too True," "Just Don't Care," "TV," "New York City," and their cover of J.J. Cale's "After Midnight," all tracks never commercially appearing on any studio LP. Additionally, the version of "12XU" from the second night was the version which appeared on the Restless compilation On Returning and with "Lowdown" on The Roxy, London WC2 from EMI, a top 20 various artist LP released in August of 1977. The concert recordings are well-preserved, probably hanging around in EMI's vaults for years before they finally gave up, perhaps EMI conceded that they can't make any money off Wire despite the amount of publicity Wire always seem to get!
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Live at CBGB Theatre, New York - July 18th 1978 wasn't recorded or preserved as well. The CD was recorded for a Live at the CBGB series that aired on WPIX radio in NYC and wouldn't have even survived had the tape not been handed to one of the Wire members after a radio session. It doesn't play the role of a fine live recording nor a hidden gem, but serves as a document of their brief US visit, where they played a couple shows, missed a few shows, and did a radio session. It's not a disc that I can imagine going back to for a lot of listens. The recording sounds as gritty as CBGB's was. An important club, CBGB's was never known for its sound or sanitation, and in the '70s, Wire weren't nearly as popular with the audiences in the US as they were in the UK and Europe. Missing flights and missing shows, the recording comes from the second set scheduled for the second night, featuring songs that all appeared in studio versions at some point. But the band seemed tense, tired, and sounded like they were rushing through the songs to try to get the whole damn thing over. A better Chairs Missing material document is by far the CD/DVD release from the performance on Germany's Rockplast TV program, On the Box.
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Discs 3, 4, and 5 in the box are restored versions of Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154: albums that have been reviewed by people worldwide for nearly three decades at this point. Basically, you should own them by now if you don't. I won't say anything more about their content or worth, you'll just have to believe me. What you get with this release is a deluxe booklet that contains lyrics that didn't appear on some of the previous pressings, back stories of the band and their experiences during the time of the recordings, tours, and various other tidbits. Absent are all bonus tracks, as the CDs represent the LPs in their original state. I understand the respect for purity in this decision, but the songs that are gone are important pieces of Wire's history and I would hope a compilation will be forthcoming to tell those stories. "Dot Dash" and "Options R" were the studio recordings initially released on Pink Flag; the extended (and far superior, in my humble opinion) single version of "Outdoor Miner," "A Question of Degree," and "Former Airline" are absent from Chairs Missing, but the four songs absent from 154: "Song 1," "Get Down parts 1&2," "Let's Panic Later," and "Small Electric Piece" are a different story as they were actually released with initial copies of 154 as a bonus 7". Of course, Wire/Pink Flag could be gearing up to compile these with the post-EMI single tracks "Our Swummer," "Midnight Bahnhof Cafe," "Crazy About Love," "Second Length," and "Catapult 30," along with some other leftover bits and pieces floating around.
For samples of these classic recordings see our Wire Sound Archive site.
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- Duncan Edwards
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The single track is of 8:29 duration, naturally enough given the date of Katrina. Conceived by New Orleans' abstract-expressionist Potpie (with thirteen releases to his credit, mostly sine-wave generated pieces like Black Panther Coloring Book), and executed by Alec (of drone-psych band Chef Menteur), the piece takes off at around the one-minute mark when the echo and loop kick in. There's no way this could have the shock of some of Reich's early audio-collages, forty years hence, but it's apt in that if you find yourself begging for it to be over, well, that's how the Crescent City citizens feel.
(Available for free download at http://www.backporchrevolution.com/hiddentrack/ .)
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When I first heard Houdini many years ago, I was mainly used to listening to absolute rubbish (barring the odd exception). Back then it was a revelation in heaviness and this new live interpretation allows me to listen to that album with fresh ears. It also allows me to kick myself harder for not being able to attend the Dublin performance of this album. As this album was recorded live without an audience, the sound quality is great. In many places it’s clearer and sharper than the original studio version. I think that the lack of audience adds to the tension of the pauses in the songs, the end of “Joan of Arc” being an example of this as each time it stops and stutters I expected the roars and whoops of a crowd. Instead the reverberation of the warehouse adds a touch of menace to the music.
These new versions are true to the original recordings in spirit if not always in performance. Houdini Live 2005 opens with “Pearl Bomb” (the song order is different to the original). Instead of the mechanical sounding drum beat there is Dale Crover’s drumming. It’s slightly sloppy but fits the song perfectly which is Crover’s style (he’s the sloppiest tight drummer I’ve heard). Trevor Dunn from Fantômas joins the core of Crover and King Buzzo and he plays like they were his bass lines to start with. Buzzo’s guitar and vocals both sound bigger this time around. Throughout the album he sounds like he’s shouting at me, demanding my attention.
There’s not a version of any song that is inferior to the original album. Equally, this album isn’t better or a replacement for the studio album. Instead this is like an alternative reality version of Houdini. “Night Goat” has an extended intro with Buzzo’s guitar feedbacking like a bitch before Crover comes in with some seriously fuzzed out bass. The song rears itself eventually like some monster from the depths reaching out for dinner. For me, the centrepiece of Houdini was always “Joan of Arc,” a grinding slab of heaviness. Here it is slightly faster but still maintains all of its charms. It is as close to any song comes to defining what the Melvins sound like. It bleeds from the speakers and congeals in the ear canal. Unfortunately it’s still too bloody short.
On the other hand, songs like “Honey Bucket” and “Going Blind” show a more accessible side to the band. They are still the most accessible parts of the album but pack more oomph now. Not considerably more of an oomph but more nonetheless. One track that stands out as being an out and out improvement is “Spread Eagle Beagle.” Over twelve minutes of thumping percussion from all three members of the band. In addition, Lustmord steps up the plate and adds processed percussion of his own. The song sounds huge compared to the original. The space of the warehouse is particularly audible on this track. It’s a colossal way to end the album.
As mentioned previously, Houdini Live 2005 isn’t going to replace Houdini. It does allow reappraisal of these songs. They still sound as breathtaking as they did when I first heard them. I don’t know how many bands can go back to an album like this (especially one that was never intended to be reproducible live) and provide such a wonderful reincarnation.
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Anyone who's heard Machine Gun will undoubtedly think of intensity and confrontation when the name Peter Brötzmann comes up. His style is audacious, bombastic, and all the more enjoyable for it. His work with the Chicago Tentet has been called, at various points, a bit more subdued than normal. While Images (released by Okka Disk) might've been quieter than normal, the versions as performed by Pillow are nothing like what I've heard by Brötzmann in the past. They are more meditative than anything he's belted out of his lungs on sax and, in fact, there's no sax to speak of anywhere in these recordings. Instead, an improvised rumbling subsists over 18 minutes of space, reshaping itself with the calls of trumpets, cellos, guitar, dry ice, and other instruments. Liz Payne's percussion is less percussive than it is environmental; it is a rapidly changing series of hiccups and metallic whines, like the wheezing of a giant printing press in its death throes.
True to many of Brötzmann's own proclivities, there are very few signs of melody and when they do appear they are a brief and welcome disturbance. For the majority of the time, this quartet plays with tonal qualities and stumbling rhythms, squeaking and shaking as much avant garde jazz does, but never exploding into rages like Brötzmann is so fond of doing (Brötzmann sometimes doesn't bother with quiet moments, continually destroying sound as he goes). The album flows together well enough, keeping a safe distance from the bland territory of material remixed over and over again for a single disc. While this saves the music from some redundancy, at certain points the random noise all becomes a bit monotonous, failing to summon up the excitement Brötzmann's playing has often evoked in me.
While my interest is piqued in small increments, I find my mind wandering during large portions of the record, my attention span drawn to what's happening around me instead of the music that's playing—there's nothing that stands out enough to keep me drawn inside the music. There are moments of beauty, especially when the cello parts stand out among the other sounds. It seems that the more meditative and withdrawn the band becomes, the more elegant and capable they sound. The last track is a great example of this, especially when compared to the other interpretations.
Taking in a piece of this record here and there can be entertaining, but as an album it fails to be consistently entertaining; it's status as a work of art is a topic beyond me. Though coherent, the album simply isn't varied enough to warrant the amount of time this band dedicates to this particular piece. "Images" was one half of a record, not a record itself.
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- Scott Mckeating
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This is the sound of brain stimulation flash storms which play out like the dreams of anaesthetised car crash victims. The floats of electronically altered high violin movements are spread a mile thick over glaring beams of individually picked notes.
This kind of burnt out overloaded minimalism is noisily virginesque and uses the obscurity of excessive sonic cover to shy away from straight up splendor. The closer or louder the listen, the clearer the day below the cloud cover becomes. Like the incidental themes of those ignored by their creator, this is a beautifully lost piece of music that gives of hints of a yawning ache. The fine edges of ever moving loops and percussive splinters give glimpses of what’s buried beneath, but they’re transitory.
The flipside’s subtler build reveals things more clearly through its leisurely pace. “Illiaster” exposes what could be flourishes of harp and electric bouts of fuzzy sound inside a swoon. An intrusive buzz that appears could have ended up being unsettling, but instead it’s like a little sliver of reality towards songs end. Axolotl obligingly provides his own gentle re-entry orbit. Although complete as standalone songs, both sides feel like they’ve been cut from a larger work. It’s hard to take in the scale, or more accurately the sheer depth of the sound, of both the title track and “Illiaster”. This Axolotl (aka Karl Bauer) 12" sounds like it was born to be a long player.
(no samples available: vinyl only)
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The debut release from Elseworth Cambs is an enjoyable EP that although they are not trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of songwriting, they produce fine examples of simple but well crafted tunes. On Leaf or Tree there are six examples of folky, pastoral songs. The vocals are relaxed and not really in tune with the music but that makes them work all the better. Musically a gently strummed acoustic guitar holds centre court with piano, glockenspiel and accordion occasionally making an appearance.
For the most part, Leaf or Tree is slow and meditative. “Oh White Swan” starts as a somber piece about seasons before the guitar changes pace and the lyrics turn to spring. Vocal harmonies and piano drift in which leads to a dramatic shift in mood, warmth takes over from the icy start. “My Eyes are Woolin” has a far rockier edge to it compared to the rest of the CD. The tempo is upped and drums add a bit of life to the music. Lyrically there is nothing startling on any of the tracks but unlike most of the current folk artists the lyrics are straightforward; the words sticking to themes of love and nature. Songs like “This Boat” and “The Storm” make me feel like brewing a cup of tea and sitting in the garden for a few hours. Maybe it’s the fact that summer is finally kicking in as I write this but Leaf or Tree is beautiful in its simplicity.
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This double CD set collects songs previously only available on 6" vinyl and adds a second disc of remixes to sweeten the deal. The level of aggression here is almost ridiculous, with every aspect of the music overflowing with testosterone. If anything, this collection is like aural steroids, with any form of subtlety to be avoided at all costs.
Each song has generically distorted guitars, drums that sound like machine guns peppering a toy kit, and ridiculously garbled and hopelessly incomprehensible vocals, which is more or less what I expected from titles like, "Thinning the Herd," "Clorox Bong (Identity Picnic)," and "Crash Course to Maximum Nowhere." Making it worse, or maybe better, is that the songs are more like snippets, with one as short as eleven seconds and none much longer than a minute. With ten songs clocking in at about eight minutes total, at least the assault is brief.
Somewhat surprising, however, are the fourteen remixes included on the second disc. Most of them are just obnoxious, but there are a few that take the minimal source material and manage to stretch and mold it into something unique, with Vinda Obmana’s "Three Ring Inferno Mix" being my favorite of these. Also enjoyable were Merzbow’s "Agorzbow Merzbleed Mix," in what I consider more or less typical of his style, and Justin Broadrick’s "Flesh of Jesu Mix," which to me actually sounds closer to his Godflesh material than his more recent incarnation. I’m a little puzzled why the original songs and the remixes are on two separate discs since everything fits easily onto one, but that’s ultimately irrelevant. Either way, the entertainment I got from this collection probably wasn’t intentional.
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At its inception, Nurse With Wound was a group, not a solo project. However, for the last 25 years or so, even with the large cast of collaborators and producers that have worked on NWW records, it has seemed like the sole autocratic creative domain of Steven Stapleton, lone surrealist wolf. That's why its odd to see Stapleton involved in so much group activity lately, with active memberships in ensembles such as Scribble Seven (with Maja Elliott, Joolie Wood, Freida Abtan, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles and Matt Waldron), the Wounded Nurse Ensemble/Salt Marie Celeste live group (with Diana Rogerson, Potter, Liles and Waldron), and now The Sleeping Moustache.
The Sleeping Moustache is an adventurous fivesome consisting of Steven Stapleton, Jim Haynes of Coelecanth, Matt Waldron and R.K. Faulhaber of irr.app.(ext.), and Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson of Icelandic experimental group Stilluppsteypa. There is no clue given as to who does what on which track, and in fact the album's packaging consists only of five primitive, apparently hand-stamped brown paper slips, each listing the five members of the group in a different order. In the background are fragments of Dada-esque typeset dialogue: "Please sirs, could you help me onto the railings so I might leap to my death into the waters?" or "This malign energy issued forth unchecked, saturating the intimate and the mundane alike to twist the innocent contents of our lives into shapes of vivid, indescribable horror." Each slip is backed with a small print by the artist listed on top. Because of the lack of practical information given about the project, the sounds on this CD emerge as even more esoteric and inscrutable than they would have anyway, and it would be impossible to untangle each artist's contribution. The only entity that can be held responsible for this album, then, is The Sleeping Moustache.
The mind-blowing quality of production is a consistent thread running through this cracked, chaotic journey across unspeakably weird audio realms, remaining vivid and thoroughly fucked for the duration of the album. The album plays like an abstract radio drama in which the narrative could never be turned back into sensible language. Chilling drones and stereo-phased plinks and plonks stretch and dilate while tiny flesh-eating robots force a freight train backwards through a rift in spacetime. Squeaking door hinges and creaking wood stairs slowly sink into a burbling peat bog at midnight, while a gas-fueled generator floods the scene with obscene fluorescent lights. Outmoded machinery and monstrous disembodied spirits battle for supremacy against a backdrop of cosmically generated keyboard drones, which shudder and pulsate as they fester into glowing red sores that blasphemously belch and vent thick steam into the pipes of a church organ. Heavily delayed voices utter foreign gobbledygook which bounces between the stereo channels, farting beings of pure static who cannibalistically consume each other inside telephone wires. Damp, evacuated warehouses serve as the setting for strange and awful ceremonies involving tesla coils, rusty steel beams and quivering electrified gelatin fingers slowly caressing articulated marionettes enacting their own doom.
Suffice to say, fans of classic Nurse WIth Wound will rejoice at The Sleeping Moustache. It's a thoroughly enjoyable resurrection of the sort of classic 1980s audio surrealism that groups like NWW and HNAS perfected, worthy of repeated deep listening sessions on headphones.
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Splitting this vinyl, and the handmade silk-screened covers, between a pair of duos from Canada and Brooklyn shows noise, guitars and drums acts don’t have to follow the routes of their bigger peers. Although Mouthus’ heavily textured freakout is worlds apart from Cousins of Reggae’s broken behemoth, there is a common battleground.
Cousins of Reggae is a massive misnomer. On this spilt they seem to prefer distorted violence to the delusions of herb, but should they ever turn their sights on Babylon, it’ll end messily for The Man. Spewing splint-legged detuned guitar mess into five chunks of ‘no future’ slaughter, this duo make primitive sludgy pummelling seem driven by aggression.
Like light starved subterranean straight edgers they jostle and batter five versions of "History and Prehistory of Hudson’s Bay." With caveman flint whittling torpedoes of feedback spurting from their doomy ham-fisted string punching, this is held down and drowned rock music. This sound of this primitive down-the-well mix of guitars, drums and noise sounds like its coming from behind the screen around the bed at the end of the ward. There’s no massive variety between these most of these songs, maybe a little bit more muscled feedback manipulation here or some distant vocals there. "Part Three" adds some elusive chimes to the staggering surges, and this portions length makes it the most satisfying of the Cousins side.
The first Mouthus cut, "Better than Facemask," layers beat upon beat with sub rhythms continuously deposing the chance of melody with a shot to the back of the head. This propulsive layering of drum is normally the preserve of Brazilian funk or the crusty dreads on a festival percussion jihad, yet Mouthus make it the sound of mechanical insects mating endlessly. Part of their appeal is the fact that the sounds thunder out from different layers of murk, pulling an addictive shadowy curtain over the turmoil like a layer of dirt. The mix seems to bring out certain pieces into the shuddering daylight only to be superseded by another beaten barrel looping rumble. Perversely with "New Drugz" the duo ditch the beats, replacing them with rushing static. Everything else that makes up Mouthus is brought a little closer to the front: the dusty stylus metal buzz, low bass tuning and Muslim / pagan chants. The band unquestionably has their rhythm thing down to a T, and "New Drugz" suffers a little from the lack of steady movement that this could bring. Its lack of flight might be paving the way for the band’s entry into blacker psychedelia, but I prefer my Mouthus to be eight limbed and on the move.
samples:
- Cousins of Reggae "History and Prehistory of Hudson’s Bay in Five Parts - Part One
- Mouthus "New Drugz"
- Mouthus "Better than Facemask'"
 
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Absurd Nightclub Comedy was, to me, an instant comedy album classic, containing so many memorable bits: humorous and bizarre anecdotes told in an incredulous tone, strange meta-jokes curiously devoid of punchlines, hilariously tangential asides and adlibs, and several well-rehearsed routines worthy of a Bob Newhart or a George Carlin thrown in at random intervals. I learned why people with no education were likely to utter phrases such as: "I am bike cheese!" I learned that gay rights aren't rights for gay people, gay rights are just rights that are gay: "Like the right to an attorney. That's a pretty gay right." I learned that my home state of Florida is "kind of like a warm, open-air prison," as well as the differences between crazy homeless people in New York and those in Seattle. Mirman read aloud his cosmically funny answers for an application to appear as an eligible bachelor on TV's "Cupid" dating show. In probably the funniest bit, Mirman created corporate advertising slogans for geometric shapes. "Circle: Now That's a Shape! Square: The OTHER Rectangle! Triangle: HOT, THREE-WAY ACTION!"
En Garde, Society! is not as immediately likeable, and doesn't contain half as many instantly memorable bits. Mirman's delivery remains solid and quite entertaining: his incredulous, self-mocking tone adding a level of self-reflexive irony into the mix on almost every joke. Eugene Mirman is one of the many modern comedians following from influential comedy forbears such as Andy Kaufman or even early Norm McDonald, underlining the absurdity and inherent phoniness of the stand-up comedy art form itself, mocking the form from within the form. Eugene Mirman frequently takes a bizarre left-turn with a joke that may seem incredibly lame, random or sloppy and unrehearsed, but he always saves it merely with his tone and mannerisms, with his linguistic prevarications, and his knowing laugh, delighted in realizing his own potential to confuse and subvert an audience's expectations.
All of that is still there, yes, but the material here just isn't as funny. Where the debut seemed to contain a whole act, from beginning to end, this album seems to be highly edited and assembled from many different shows, snatching a new joke or a new bit from here and there and slapping it all together. Some of the bits are just as hilarious as those on his first disc, such as the Christian beauty magazine routine, where Mirman merely reads the aforementioned publication out loud to the audience, pausing now and then for a sardonic or cutting commentary on the sheer awfulness and stupidity of this shining example of religious propaganda for the young. However, other bits, such as the "Papa John's pizza or not remembering my abortion," seem tacky and not well rehearsed. There are more hilarious bits that resemble humorous personal anecdotes more than they do jokes, which is always good, and rarely found in contemporary standup comedy, except for the great David Cross. More stories about Mirman's background as a Russian emigre' figure in, this time narrating his family's daring escape to America while having their phones tapped by the KGB (all true, apparently).
This sophomore album is a bit shorter than the first, and contains a long and annoyingly pointless filler track towards the end. The track consists of a "skit" with Mirman talking to himself after driving home from the show, which segues into an overlong and very stupid song which will not seem funny to anyone except for those who masochistically enjoy laborious and unfunny "comedy" routines. There was also a silly and superfluous "megamix" track at the end of the first album, but at least it elicited a chuckle or two, more than I can say for the new one. All of these weaknesses, however, are more than made up for by the number of times Mirman still made me laugh on this album, such as the insane screaming of a waiter to a customer about to eat seafood fished from red tide waters: "Your face will shit mice!" When Mirman painstakingly deconstructs some asshole's random comment that he would like to put his "tubesteak" in a passing girl's "hot oven," I nearly rolled on the floor with unselfconscious laughter, and I was listening completely alone, unaided by cannabis. While the "Letters to Nouns" and "Coupons for the Audience" bits don't work nearly as well as they should, other bits are far funnier than they might seem on paper, such as the Jack in the Box chicken strips that are mysteriously advertised as "REAL" on a billboard.
The included DVD is not a video of this standup routine, which would have been nice, but rather a collection of short films that were originally posted on Eugene Mirman's website, or on his Village Voice blog. As such, they have been available to anyone with a high-speed connection for a while now, and thus the DVD seems fairly superfluous, even with Mirman's commentary track, which is generally unhelpful and only occasionally funny. The short films range in length and quality, from painfully unfunny skits such as "Scotch and Soda" to supremely amusing clips like "A Video Eugene Sent Himself From the Future." It all amounts to not longer than 10-15 minutes of video. All told, this is a bit of a chintzy package from Sub Pop, but still, what's there is more often than not embarassingly hilarious, and well worth a listen. In my mind, Eugene Mirman hasn't lost his place as the most talented young comedian of the contemporary milieu.
samples:
- Joking and Lying, Jack in the Box, Extreme Bowling
- Movie, Deep-Fried Stuffed Cheeseburger, What Kind of Animal?, Red Tide, Abortion
- Revolve (The Complete New Testament in the Form of a Teen Magazine)
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Mord are vicious sounding. The guitars could curdle milk and the blast beats jar my ears like machine gun fire. Christendom Perished is a good black metal album full of menace and fraught with atmosphere, all that is traditionally needed in a black metal album. At first listen, I thought this was a good album but lacking in terms of innovation. Repeated listens reveal how dense the songs are, little elements like what sounds like a processed angle grinder on “Opus II” adds another plane to the music. Shards of noise like this appear at various points throughout the album and push Mord from being just another Mayhem obsessed band to a band that within an album or two could help redefine the limits of black metal.
Another thing that sets Mord apart from the vast quantities of mediocre black metal bands is the thickness of their sound. Many bands have a preoccupation with sounding thin and bleak but Mord have a fattened sound that is more like an inferno than the usual frozen wastes visited by long haired men in corpse paint. “Opus IV” features a bass that sounds like Nordra is playing it with a jackhammer. It sounds great but tends to be masked behind Necrolucas’s double bass drumming. Necrolucas’s style is conventional in terms of the genre but executed with all the power of a napalm attack. The full, fiery music is accompanied by fitting visuals of bombed out rubble in the sleeve. Christendom Perished is a battle album. It is violent, dark and incredibly heavy.
The album is just the right length. Mord keep it terse and tight and the album works all the better for it. Keeping up with the frenzied assault is tiring work; an album of 80 minutes would be overkill. By the time “Opus IX” (there is no “Opus VIII”) finished I felt shell shocked and glad to be alive. Not many albums leave me feeling like I’ve done a tour of duty but Christendom Perished manages to do just that.
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