Persecution of Scum

Funny story about this album: I was buying a bundle of black metal albums from a seller and he was offering this album for one measly euro, or free if you spent over €10 on a purchase. I was intrigued and kind of felt like diving headfirst into some bands I had never heard of anyways, so I bought a couple of other CDs (two of which I'm planning to review for this very challenge later!) and picked up this one as a freebie. About a year after acquiring it, I did some digging on it and discovered that, based on the identities of those few who had added it to their own or want lists online, it's highly likely that the members behind Apokalyptic Warlust are National Socialists. Oops. I'm not sure whether it's because of that that the seller was offering Persecution of Scum for so cheap, or because of the actual music on it, but either way I'm really glad I managed to hear this.

I'll say this much: Apokalyptic Warlust are not what anybody, even me, would call "good". Objectively, this is probably one of the most ridiculously shitty albums anybody has ever heard, but I honestly can't hate it - the trashiness is just too fucking weird. I think there's a coherent, decipherable rhythm on this album three, maybe four times throughout its entire 34-minute running time; the rest of the time is basically the guitars trying to stay in time with themselves while the drums are doing... god knows what (I'm not kidding when I say that it seriously sounds like the drum kit consists solely of a snare drum and a crash, and that the playing technique usually sounds like *snareblastsnareblastsnareblastsnareblast*...*one second pause* *CRASH* repeated ad infinitum). Paradoxically weak but enthused rasps interject over the music at random times, causing severe clipping in the microphone maybe 50% of the time anything is ever said. An acoustic, Spanish-influenced guitar passage brings the album to a close, which is suspiciously Enmity-esque in nature in that the band seem blissfully unaware that it is practically the antithesis of the eight tracks before it on the album.

Even funnier, the mix varies wildly between songs. Sometimes every single music track is bundled up in the center of the sonic space; sometimes the guitars are panned almost alllll the way to the left and the drums are panned alllll the way to the right. The guitar tone subtly changes throughout the album, but the general riffs sound the same: vehement, fast and unhinged thrash/black pieces that tend to repeat themselves horribly before moving onto another, equally sloppy riff. They're not bad riffs, I guess, but it's really hard to objectively judge them when the rest of the music around them is so ridiculously absurd.

Humans were not made to review this - it's too kvlt for my feeble brain to comprehend. It's quite possibly one of the most objectively terrible things I've ever heard, but I don't hate it. I lack the capacity to hate it. If an album whose music makes me absolutely euphoric and keeps me intensely interested is a 100 and an offensively awful, boring and just generally horrible album is a 0, then this is maybe a 75, but the music isn't really good enough for me to give it a score like that in good conscience. Still, the complete lack of polish and shamelessly retarded rawness definitely gives off more of an atmosphere and a mood than most truly egregious shit, and Apokalyptic Warlust manage to be awful in a pretty unique and interesting way, so I guess Persecution of Scum isn't totally worthless; plus, you have to take into account that the band seemingly take themselves totally seriously, and the fact that the retardation here is apparently completely unintentional just makes it even better. It's a damn shame that most people reading this will never hear it; in a just world this would receive a lavish LP reissue by Nuclear Blast, complete with a 40-page biography on the band. I can see it now, the black metal equivalent of The Shaggs getting HBO documentaries made about them 20 years in the future. Seriously, you need to track this down by any means possible and hear it, because it's by far the best €0 I ever spent.