Trans Cunt Whip

Hovering between metal genres, Osmose Productions recently released a remastered version of Trans Cunt Whip, but took away from the original 1998 proceedings by applying too much polish. This type of Satanic with a capital S black metal is meant to crawl into your subconscious and lay eggs of corruption and soul distortion, it's not meant to have a bright cheery sheen. The original 1998 version is nicely gritty and filthy and sexual and rebellious, and covered in hate and fluids. What you have here is Germans taking Swedish melodic death metal, adding in spoken word samples, and industrial noises, and making catchy interesting melodeath, which belies its head-nodding tendencies by being doused in antisocial perversion. It's thematically and philosophically, however, more like black metal made by people who are hyper fixated on individualism, freedom, sexual exploration, and extreme sensation, and those attitudes pervade all the music and the album cover, and the lyrics, and even the archived interviews with Tsatthoggua, which you can find online, are mildly uncomfortable.

Most of us have our dealings with darkness and eventually think better of it, but some people make deep diving the abyss their life's work. Trans Cunt Whip has Teutonic parameters, but within the tidy playing and decent production oozes depravity and pain, and blood and semen. It's an album coated in piss and bile. It revels in the knowledge it'll make a lot of listeners kind of guilty for enjoying it. A BDSM black metal album with militaristic undertones is the most German thing ever, so why shouldn't Trans Cunt Whip be exactly what it is?

It's not completely fair to call this a black metal album or a pure melodeath album: really it lives/parasites/haunts in between black metal, melodeath, and industrial. If pushed I'd err on black metal even though the melodeath leanings are strong, the overall intention behind Trans Cunt Whip is complete filth...which is really one of the pillars of black metal, that anti-everything bleak hedonism. Status Sturmer bleeds into Courtesan Mary Slut surrounded by all sorts of devious diversions. To the Credo of Inversion, Golden Shower (the 'hit', and featured on magazine cover cds), Angel of the Universe, In Dope We Trust, all mid to fast paced melodeath, but frosted up and made quite nasty and full of black metal's darker ideology, and maybe even an implication here and there of NSBM. To the Credo of Inversion,

The omen of Ischariot, oracle of a dying
God - gave birth to inverting throb
The pulse of living blasphemies
At your morals and your stars we mock

Let's praise our greed for life and sun
Let's praise our need for thrills and fun
Let's praise our credo of the dark to come

No guitar solos, no clean vocals, just a very professional consistent batch of songs which blend melody, tremolo picked, lots of nice blasting, not a huge amount of bass guitar, everything kept in the midrange frequencies. There are a few tempo changes in each song, but even the slower moments stay quite fast. Tom rolls keep the beats spicy, and the cymbal-work is first rate throughout. Lyrics are in English and German, and the singer is called North Wind. They want to be Scandinavian so much it hurts, on one level, but Tsattshoggua also bring the Germanic in spades. Trans Cunt Whip has a riff style echoing Marduk and Dark Funeral, and yet the tidiness, slight pop sensibility, and userfriendlyness of At the Gates or Dark Tranquility.

So if you want a genuinely edgy weird album that bounces between black metal and melodeath, and you want to listen to something slightly dangerous and out of bounds, with tight guitar playing, tight drumming, very cool harsh vocals, and consistent songs, all thematically very dark, and enhanced by judicious use of samples, well Trans Cunt Whip is all that, with added nihilism, perversion, and esoteric rumblings.

Not for normal people, and a bit of a roll of the dice even for metal fans.