The Work Which Transforms God

Draining, that's one word you can use to describe this album. And I say that with as much respect as I can from the very bottom of my soul.

While Blut Aus Nord had already begun prototyping a heavy, post-apocalyptic, wall-of-sound variety of black metal in 2001 with the Mystical Beast of Rebellion, they decided to go all out and fully realize this sound with 2003's The Work Which Transforms God. The monolithic soundscape is given far more depth and sinister, soul-draining compositions which give off a bleak, hellish atmosphere that serves best to terrify and depress the listener into submission. The Work Which Transforms God is an alien and otherworldly album that sounds like it crawled it's way out of some other dimension to bring it's unique variety of hell into our own. Yet for all the evil and grime, there is much to be experienced here that is worth your while.

Every note of this album seems to be there to test the limits of your despair. Songs such as The Choir of the Dead, Axis, Our Blessed Frozen Cells, and The Howling of God serve their part to unleash ultimate demented hell upon you with Their sounds. The guitars are tuned in a way that mixes with the production to create this cold, rusted, unfeeling industrial sound that barely resembles a guitar as they play forth their wild, snaking rhythms in deranged time-signatures alongside drums that propel the listener through the void made by this music. The vocals give off a feeling of inhumanity and torture as if you are being spoken to by some horrid abomination from beyond, often times you can understand nothing, other than at one moment when Vindsval screams "I AM THE SAVIOR!" in Choir of the Dead, everything else is deliberately unintelligible, adding to the feeling of "otherness" on this album. It is meant to put images of a cold, polluted, rainy, dead world of steel and rust into your mind as you slowly embrace the decay progressing around you. Driving through places like Newport News and Portsmouth, where urban decay runs rampant only helped me experience the loathsome atmosphere more thoroughly as my surroundings conformed to the music. This is only further helped by the slow, imposing ending, "Procession of the Dead Clowns" which only needs one riff to put out the atmosphere of being alone in a decaying world. It's also a strangely relaxing and triumphant piece, as if to say "you've made it to the end, you deserve a rest, but in our style. Enjoy marveling at this tranquil, yet morbid soundscape." Truly an imposing piece of music.

With all its inhumanity and hellishness, The Work Which Transforms God chills you to the bone, takes you to hell, and leaves you wanting to come back for another soul-draining session. It is a black monolith upon the world of black metal with its alien sound and depressive density. It is so dense and thick and otherworldly that some have taken to calling it "black hole metal", an apt descriptor for deliberately brickwalled music that sounds like it's bending reality around where it was recorded. Any aficionados of black metal looking for something truly out there and draining (in a good way) should give this one a listen, it's about as far out there as you can get.