Urfaust

It's just amazing how the French keep on cranking out top-quality black metal bands and the wonderfully named Satanas Vobiscum et Spiritum Tuo has to be one of the rawest and grimmest of such bands. "Urfaust" has an incredibly epic feel and the black metal guitar fuzz that pours out of the speakers is so strong and forceful that if you get too close to your CD player you'll be sent flying against the wall by the sheer power of the music. The SVEST guys shred their guitars with nuclear-powered muscles and the drummer pounds his skins so fast and so hard, it's like hearing sonic booms of a plane breaching the sound barrier. These men are waaay beyond chaos and power!

The first track "Putrefiance Redemptrice" comes in at 21 minutes but your brain will feel as though it's been through torture about three times as long! A militaristic charging intro leads you into a series of chaotic blastbeat explosions, each and every one of them a brain-frying mindfuck that builds up tension and aggression continuously until about the eighth minute when the Mother of all Psychedelic Mind-Destroying Pyrotechnic Explosions bursts upon you in all its atom-smashing glory and the devious musicians unleash slashing guitar wobble tremoloes that scythe and laser their way into your frazzled brain cells and nerve synapses and cut and reduce them into quivering plasma pieces. This ongoing 3-minute orgy of lightning guitar violence and booming percussion is surely one of the most magnificent moments in the history of demented music torture. SVEST continue the psychological assault with more blastbeat bursts and gibbering sandpaper vocals for yet another 10 minutes though after just half the song is done we surely have little grey matter left in our heads to suffer the rest of the onslaught.

The rest of the album is no less of a total mind-crushing experience though it's very much a footnote to "Putrefiance ...": the deranged psychedelic feel continues in the sparkling piercing tones, reminiscent of early Mayhem guitarist Euronymous's work, in the second track "Nuit de Walpurgis". This piece has definite guitar riffs that repeat throughout so it's more coherent if no less single-minded and, as with the previous song, builds up to a climax in the fourth minute with brain-numbing echoing booms of tom-toms and hellishly screaming guitars. The repetitive riffs become nauseous but no matter how much the brain cells are frying and screaming under the sonic torture, you keep on listening because the sheer intensity and ferocity are just so overwhelming and have such a tremendous momentum, you just have to follow all the way to the end!

We're into the last track "Epitaphe" and - those guys just don't know when to stop! - "Epitaphe" has a stop-start rhythmic approach but it's extremely violent with gravelly roaring vocals and more jaw-dropping stickwork. The drummer must be onto his third or fourth or fifth set of skins by now, he really bashes them into the ground. His pals continue on their merry whirling-dervish shredding way through several sets of guitars which they grind down into sawdust or cat litter, they play so fast as though they eat heavy iron-fortified croissants all day long. A constant baleful guitar-produced drone is very apparent in this track (it appears in the other two tracks as well but seems more noticeable here) which adds to the atmosphere of turbulent hell.

If you're a sucker for punishement, the coda to "Urfaust" is the same as the intro so Little Masochistic You can have your CD player on automatic replay and the entire album forms a loop that keeps on mowing down any grey matter you still have left in your head and turn it all into protoplasmic jelly.

For sheer savagery and intense raw power this album has few peers. There is a very full-bodied sound and momentum with layers of guitar licks everywhere especially during the climax of "Putrefiance ..." and understandably the music drowns out the deep and raspy singing which does not vary much. With everything so over-the-top the vocalist could afford a few high-pitched ear-splitting screeches here and there but that might mean fighting against the music resulting in chaos of an unwanted and messy kind. No - this grim and blasphemous sonic attack, despite its appearance of extreme turbulence and explosions going off all the time, has a certain single-minded precision of its own, cutting down with laser ray-gun psychedelic guitar blasts and thunderous drumming all those who get in the way. If SVEST do not record another full-length studio album, I won't be worrying because this is already the band's finest moment and the guys will find it hard to top this effort.