Black Deceiver

Necroslut happen to be a band from Finland. No offense to Finland, but am I supposed to be impressed by a fat-looking musician with a bald head who resembles (the stupid-looking version of) Steve Wilkos? I could tell by the band's name alone, that I wouldn't be able to take this project very seriously. I can already imagine how dreadful the other songs must sound on the band's other releases. Not that I really care, but I mean, either you're good at music...or you're not. Generally, there isn't really an..."in-between", in these regards. So, we'll see why this band's a failure...probably for a lot of (untold) reasons...

So, in a nutshell, the first few minutes of this awful record, can lead into a horrible headache. So, if you're someone who gets annoyed at musical-related constructions that are in poor taste, I can already tell you to stay away from this album. My nerves pulsate violently when I hear this shit, because of how badly this record stinks. This mixing is so abhorrent that even a deaf human wouldn't be able to stand it. And that's probably bad, considering the fella wouldn't be able to hear anything from the start. But at least we could pretend it was a (dreadful) maricle (for a brief period).

The mastering is even worse, ever hear the sound of your own heart before? Well, I strongly assume everyone has, but imagine that you can feel it, but just in your ears alone...that's what this shitty album sounds like. Perverted-pounding, but of the heart. It's like sexual excitement...but for all the wrong reasons (rape, but ear-rape, to put it calmly). The production is extremely rough, you can feel the guitars being (literally) severed in-half, by the drums, mainly from the bass (drum) being kicked, repeatedly. It's like chopping up a fish that's still fighting for its life, and eventually resulting in the removal of your own thumb from the lack of knife-control.

The guitars are low-tuned to match something that relates to "goregrind", and are performed just as quickly. Only difference is, that most goregrind, is actually better than this fucking record. I don't care how badly-produced goregrind can be, this shit is like...the original sin of being shit. As I mentioned before, the guitars are totally being dismembered by the production of the drums, and it's with all the songs, too. It's like the drums are being played in the main room, and the guitars are being played in the attic, not to mention, the vocals being played from the basement. Everything is so muffled, but the drums are the least muffled, because of their extreme-like loudness. But still have that "dull" production, of course. The vocalist sounds like he's shitting, he's pushing too hard onto his throat and getting this...so-called "tough-guy" voice. If that happens to be the case, maybe he's recording from the bathroom terlet (toilet)?

The artwork features your typical, yet retarded Satanic-imagery (which is overrated these days), just like more black metal bands display amongst themselves (these days, especially). Black 'n' white art, a goat, even Satan Himself (sometimes), a female slut being gutted, sometimes of children, in this case, yeah (both)... People must feel really proud of themselves and feel tough to put really disgusting images onto their releases...especially of things regarded as "pure", originally. Oh well, I guess it's alright, simply because it's freedom-of-expression. But still doesn't change the fact that these things are becoming "normal". Pretty bad that stupid shit has to become "normal" (when it clearly isn't) for it to be "accepted" by weirdos. But again, it's a personal choice. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone, not even fans of black 'n' death metal. This shit is overly-crunchy, poor-crafted and just bad, entirely. Fuck you...

For a guy as prolific as Finland's Shatraug, it's sort of no surprise that he's got a number of mostly under-the-radar projects that get released to no particular fanfare despite his relatively high profile. Sure, new releases by Horna, Sargeist or Behexen tend to make waves, but Finnish black metal is still underground enough (often handwaved away as "me too" Darkthrone worship by people who don't particularly care for the traditional sounds of the second wave in the first place) that things like Necroslut's Black Deceiver can be essentially entirely overlooked. Hell, I had never even listened to this band at all and had this, their sole album, tossed into a package as a freebie.

So, is this some criminally overlooked gem of the underground passed around among black metallers like years-old fruitcake with no one in particular really giving it the love it deserves? Well, not really. Sorry, Shatraug, but while I'm sure this album was a blast to make, it's something of a tiring listen. Clocking in at nearly an hour and a staggering eighteen tracks of lo-fi, roaring deathly, punky black metal, this is just a massive slab of unrelenting garage violence.

Guitars are tuned real low and all the high end is completely rolled off, so the super simple riffs are just sorta like a big dumb rhino or maybe a busted old diesel truck overburdened with a load of paving gravel struggling up a hill. The super-filthy bass guitar is hoary and covered in muck, so sort of melds with the guitars at its edges to form something of a uniform wall of granite across the decidedly lo-fi mix. There are guitar leads but they're utterly buried beneath the cement mixer riffing. The drums, other than the indistinct bass drums, do manage to make their presence known by simple virtue of being slightly higher pitched than the churning riffs that stomp all around them. Shatraug's moaning Tom Warrior growls/primitive thrash shouts are way off in the distance and somewhat indistinct, which is just fine since they don't really do anything all that compelling.

And that's the story of the whole album, really. Each song is usually only about two and a half minutes, but also typically only has like two or three riffs so even at their steady quick clip, the repetition combined with the absolutely draining guitar tone and massive length of this album wear you down pretty quick. It's not like this is meant to be an oppressive, emotionally draining experience, either - one glance at song titles like "Fuck & Destroy" and "I Worship Satan" and you'll know that this is meant to be rollicking blasphemous fun. I mean, shit, the cover art has a sexy naked nun in corpsepaint and a pair of demon priests pulling some skeleton baby with hooves from the womb of a bile-spewing porn star with fake tits on it.

The problem is manifold. There are too many just plain pointless filler riffs, during the fast parts especially, that are basically just a couple of powerchords bashed out with loads of violence, while the better riffs suffer from being too short (usually only a bar or two long) so they get repeated about a million times in the space of a single song. There are some pretty great big chunky ones, though, like in the bridge breakdown section of "Virgin Pervertor," but they're relatively few and far between. I get the distinct impression that Shatraug wrote about 60 riffs, rejected exactly zero of them as being too dull to use anywhere, then tossed them all into eighteen simple ABCABC structures, recorded it in a weekend and called it an album. Hell, there aren't even lyrics - I would not at all be shocked to learn that the vocals were improvised.

The result is that the whole thing feels half-assed, shat out without any real care given to making it sound good. I can't even begin to fathom how much this thing could've been improved by going through the list of riffs and cutting the total count in half by dropping all of the shitty ones, then making an album half as long as this one with the remainder. This album wants so bad to be a fun little romp through blood and guts, but instead is about as exhausting a listen as an album can possibly be. Even swaggering, sexy groove monsters like "Raise the Fist" (which sounds like it could be a demo of a Black Breath song or something) can't save this from being completely tiring.