Canadian Black Coffee and Italian Black Metal

Raise the unholy libation, present the sacrifice. This Italian black mass of traditional occult black metal is a mystikal ritual for all to indulge in. Every unearthed corpse has a morbid tale to connect us through seance to our dark master. Black clouds of delirious ceremonial chant and sacremental song augment the dark storms of irratic violence this horde pervertedly procreate. Satan is primordially invoked with riffing orthodoxy and vomitted summonings as the band enact their malevolent musical witchcraft. Meanwhile witches dance in shroud around the offering spilling chalices of blood. Unlike the more dejected, depressive graveyard contemplation of their contemporary Italian sects MonumentuM and Cult of Blood, The 13 Drape deliver their bleak visions of funereality with pumelling grimness and evil. Just look at the dead guy on the cover's reaction.

13th Way

Be flung into this emotional stew of blackest thoughts and demonic impulses. Embrace the left hand and debase the natural. Follow your black mass intuition to the extreior circle of existence. Leave behind this unified and barren universe for chaos eternal. The morbidly opaque spectral veil that is Necromass evoke psychic images of this carnival of blasphemy we call mortality from the abysmal obscurity beyond. Mysteria Mystica Zofiriana is a downwards spiral of bestial adrenaline and Satanic reflection that will leave you dizzily disillusioned. A must at sodomatic orgies of hate.

Into an Image of Left

ABOLISH ALL YOUR IGNORANT THOUGHTS NOW !

Stick this in your pipe and smoke it. There is so much shit going on in the world, especially my world, right now; people fighting for what we assumed too long to be our given rights and getting tear gassed. Students on strike because they've learned something from school and those that haven't opposing to keep blindly feeding into the business model that will make our Universities into men-in-suits-with-briefcases factories and leave the concept of class mobility and personal betterment through public education in the dust. We need this kind of apocalyptic idealism right now, or I do anyways. Take a bite out of that Crunchy Bar guitar tone and the bludgeoning drum machine gun precision of Mick Harris, who bashed buckets on Scum the very same year this came out. Be confused by the 20sec-1min tributes to the band's favourite cartoon cat and friends. Be astonished by the nihilistic brutality that accompanies them. Look into your nuclear crystal ball and see the end times. Abolish all your ignorant thoughts now!

Uninformed

Canadian Metal Classics Pt. 3

Alright, so it would seem that much more metal is in order this month as we didn't get to cover that much in the past while and I'm sure many of you have catching up to do, especially when it comes to the underappreciated and essential contributions that my country made to the international scene in the '80s. Today we have a hacked up corpse of cross-genre mutilation a la Sacrifice and their 1985 debut Torment In Fire. This is probably one of the most porgressive releases of its day, managing to seamlessly weave together the unhinged chaos of later speed metal, the caveman destruction of early death metal and frenetic thrash metal riffing, all together with an HC-informed "we don't give a fuck" approach. Sacrifice's sheer disregard for metal's growing conformity to subgenre stereotypes at the time makes them indispensible in the carving of the jagged void from which later death metal and second wave black metal would spew forth. In many senses this is to me one of the very first Black/Thrash/Death records as it so liberally blurs it's wide range of influences. One facet that literally screams this are Urbinati's completely ludicrous vocals. Along with an audible Tom Araya in his raspy rapid-fire verse delivery, we can hear one of the first death growls developing in some songs (such as 'Burned at the Stake') while it is his high-pitched shreiks that clearly place Rob in a far darker universe from us. Perhaps the most provocatively morbid sounds suggested on this record are those of the cacophonous rhythm section who not only bring a scraping and frantic punk feel to the performances but also seem to foreshadow the militaristic rhythms found in later Canadian 'War metal' acts like Revenge and Conqueror. See the openings to songs such as "Homicidal Breath" and "Infernal Visions" or the bridge of "Necronomicon" for examples of this. While these are only suggestions of the blackened insanity that my country would unleash unto the world in the coming decades, you will see the aesthetic even further developed in a later post of this retrospective series. But for now, dim the lights, draw the pentagram in chalk on the floor, grab a beer and bang your head as you're possessed by this piece of killer-canuck carnage!
  

 TURN IN YOUR GRAVE