War

This is some serious black metal right here.

In the most superficial sense this is not very black metal at all, yet when superficial ideas are removed, this is as black metal as one can get. When you look a bands like 1349, they come across as being very black metal. They have blastbeats, tremelo riffs, shrieks and Satanic lyrics, which is what black metal is all about, right? In a very conventional way, yes. But really, black metal was originally a perversion of music, a sneer against contemporary metal and one great spit upon what was once comfortable to listen to. When bands like 1349 release the stuff they do, they lose that element that was once so important, and simply clone all the superficial elements of the music, so it then becomes the same old blastbeats, same old tremelo riffs, same old shrieks.

In this light, Black Tribe is more black metal than 1349 may ever be. With this early recording, John Gill simply looks back at all past music, and all the ways we're supposed to play music, and sneers at it all. He sneers, and then sets out to record this audial hell. It would make sense to call this noise, as it clearly is. It's much more distorted and unorganised than Dead Raven Choir or the Mayhem demos, but it's not quite as pure noise as Masonna or anything of the sort. Instead, what we have is this big, empty sea of distortion which sticks around throughout the entire demo, changing in intensity every now and then, and then lurking behind that, beneath all the noise are a few melancholic riffs, crawling in out of nowhere like a disturbed dream when one is settling into sleep and then disappearing into a distorted abyss again. Melancholic isn't really the word, actually, as melancholy is an emotion, and this is totally dead of emotion.

'Dead of emotion' may be the whole aesthetic behind Black Tribe. This recording doesn't seem to have any human emotions to speak of, nothing but pure emptiness. This is anti-human music, unlike other music which is made for us to relate to, this seems to have been made to stand in opposition to us, like something we smile politely at but ignore and get as far away from as possible, our hearts filled with fear. The demo opens with a Charles Manson sample, which makes perfect sense in this context. No remorse, no sorry, just existance. Get the job done, no matter what that job may be, with no second thought as to who it bothers, who it scares, who it kills. Black Tribe covers GG Allin a few years later...starting to understand this now?

This is not nice music. Behind the mass of abrassive noise, there are a few heartless strummings, some chaotic percussion which seems to just blend into the whole mess, tambourine, strange squeaks, inhuman shrieks and yells and what sounds like some militarialistic march sounds. Horrible noise to some, perfect sense to others. Why is this not cult yet? This should be a reference point to all future black metal bands - forget the way you're supposed to play, forget logic and patterns and influence, forget humanity. Carve your own path.