Deathstench - Massed In Black Shadow

Sometimes, the ordinary life passes by us on a daily basis, full of routine actions and occasions, blunting our emotions, turning everything around into one grey line. During such periods it is very important to whip up all senses with a portion of some fresh experience shacking up stagnated feelings. There are lots of different activities that are available all around bringing enough entertainment, but few souls have a constant impulse towards something more extreme and perverted like kind of a violent cult or ancient bloody ritual. While you still in doubt about the decision whether to try out such an experience or not, Deathstench arrives right in time to reveal all the dark passion hidden behind the drape of occult knowledge that will convince you to make a step forward for sure. Sometimes the most important decisions need guidance from a more able person, and the sound brought through 'Massed in Black Shadow' can be the right material to gain the specific spirit and courage.

The new record of Deathstench is definitely something different from what I've heard in the past. It was 100% clear from the package of this cd that the material presented on it will speak about themes of Satanism, occult nature of human soul, revelations through the specific rituals and so on. An opening track doesn't disappoint my prejudgment and hits hard with a wall of dirty noise, drilling textures spread all over the music and distorted vocals somewhere between screaming and growling bringing forth a strong piece of death industrial composition.

The second track "Corpse Upon a Throne of Worms" continues with a creepy sound crawling slowly into the very depth of my soul, and suddenly a droning heavy guitar session joins the show putting a lot of pressure on the whole structure with extremely slow drones balancing on the edge of noise. Using a wide hall effect gives the music a lot of space to explore and this element is significant to all the tracks. "Symbols in Warm Flesh" is a thick and dense composition that combines both death industrial and dark ambient structure where layers of noisy components of various frequencies bound together on the top of a distant background hum. A guitar session returns on "Circle of Black Blood" together with demonic vocals projecting a vision of a mess or a ritual conjuring the demons from the worst of human dreams; I can almost smell a rotten breath of the demons on my face.

As the record spins towards the fifth track "Shrine of Viscera", the atmosphere of occultism flooded my room capturing every corner of imagination when suddenly few minutes of black metal broke into the composition. I am not the biggest fan of raw black metal material, so that kind of a move left me very confused as soon as it didn't fit perfectly into the structure of the album even being close thematically to the concept. Just in a second when my patience started to fade away, Deathstench cut the process of tearing guitars apart and returned to the trodden road of a good old industrial noise using different kinds of hand tools to create a massive cacophony.

To conclude a journey through darkest rituals and satanic visions, "Bastards of the Black Flame" put a thick point with a mixture of all the techniques used in this album. All of them are poured out on me, wide atmosphere, slow droning guitars, violent growling, overloaded instruments, all of them together drive the listener towards the natural end of his journey - an eternal triumph of black blood.

As the result of Deathstench sound exploration, they succeed in projecting the occultist concept into the depth of their music creating a solid piece of evil and creepy album. There were some weak points like this black metal part of the fifth track and too monotonous vocals from time to time, but I feel that it is rather a matter of my personal taste, than an obvious disadvantage of the record. Though I was left with a little bit of controversial feelings, the conceptual impulse is quite fresh and different these days. I cannot remember anything close to this kind of music, maybe old albums of Valefor can be a good example, but they were not that aggressive for sure. Anyhow, it is a strong material and worth to check out for every fan of death industrial and power electronics genre. Feb 06 2013