Degenerate Collection

What’s with all these sun-baked southerners being so prodigal with suicidal gloom? Seriously, you’ve Dictator from Cyprus, Striborg from Tasmania, Halla from Iran, Xasthur from sunny So-Cal, Happy Days from San Antonio, and too many suicidal bands to count from fucking Portugal. Now you can add the band Batrakos from Italy to the list. Hell, my moods actually noticeably worsen as the days get longer, but most people work in the opposite manner. Still, those who are into underground lo-fi metal are numerous enough these days. It shouldn’t surprise me that there are so many from sunny and idyllic clines who’ve nothing but visceral aversion and misgivings for their circumstances.

The Degenerate Collection looks to be collection of their previous three demos. What you’ve got here is pretty solid and unorthodox lo-fi industrial black metal that shows some promise. Percussion is repetitious to the point of sounding soulless, though given the sound they seem to be going for, this isn’t really a bad thing at all. The guitars are seldom anything more than undulating distortion which works largely in unison with what sounds like synths or some other F/X-type instrument. No eyebrows raised elitists, these keys sound nothing like symphonic shite. More akin to a primitive version of Diamanda Galas. Occasionally one hears clean notes break through the noise, or a relatively crisp tremolo arrangement serving as an intro. By and large though, its all a monolithic wall of noise that serves to enrich the atmosphere, the ‘presence’ of the sound. What the fuck else matters?

The most dynamic aspect of the music is by far the vocals. Heavily process to be distorted all across the spectrum, and howled and muttered and spat out not at all in unison with the otherwise uniformly churning rusty gears. What seems most likely to me is that this is entirely intentional. Figuratively the vocalist serves as a piece of flesh fodder, both biologically and spiritually, to be ground up for fuel by a vast and indifferent memetic machine overcome with age and slowly breaking under its own weight. Everything feels figuratively broken, blighted, and ultimately doomed through the lens of Batrakos’s sound, both microcosm and macrocosm alike.