Ratocracy

What we've got here is a quite recently published record, the new album by Roman Iskorostensky (hailing from Moscow), and the first under his monicker Arsafes, called Ratocracy. This album, as he himself described it, is supposed to “punch you in the face, rape you and leave your body somewhere on the sidewalk as food for stray dogs!”. And I have to admit that it really does! It certainly is a “progressive extreme metal” album, featuring a lot of the guitar work that Roman is known for (see Nevid’, Kartikeya, Above the Earth) and, luckily, a huge amount of his incredibly variable vocal performances as well. Execution and overall sound are perfectly done considering the intention of creating aggressive, technical music, so this album really punches you in your face with songs like 'Dog Eat God', 'E.T.F.M.', and 'American War Machine', while also leaving space for some more calm and ballad-esque songs like 'Faith', '20 Days', and 'Divine'.

An interesting aspect is that this album features a lot of guest artists, but you’d never guess that normally, as they all fit (are fitted, or suit themselves) into the overall concept perfectly well so that it is quite homogeneous while displaying an incredible amount of musical variability. The latter is further emphasized by the three bonus tracks, all of them being covers. One of them is, kind of surprisingly, Arsafes' version of Rihanna's song 'Cockiness'. As I am almost completely ignorant of pop music, I don't know the original, but I guess it surely does not sound like that! Throughout these covers (the other two being Strapping Young Lad's 'Far Beyond Metal' and GG Allin's 'Drink, Fight and Fuck'), Roman continues to blend new elements perfectly into his style, only leaving some short glimpses of what the songs may have sounded like originally. Another fascinating thing to me is the fact that I really can’t compare this album, this style to another band, which usually could be helpful in order to describe the music to someone else. But in this case I don’t know any fitting comparisons, so I simply suggest you to listen to it!

This album is a powerful, brutal, yet sometimes beautiful record that shows no real weakness and is a perfect example for what Roman Iskorostensky is capable of. I'll surely give this one a lot of future listens while I'm trying to wait patiently for Kartikeya's next album, Samudra, as well as for Arsafes' next solo effort, IX, that he himself described to be "epic". And I'm quite sure both albums will be worth the wait and I hope that at least some readers out there give this great example of Russian extreme metal a try!

originally written for https://www.facebook.com/VoicesOfTheEasternLands