Genre: Noise / Dark Ambient / Industrial

01 Intro
02 Delight of Evil
03 Kill Invalid Target
04 Skulls in Remainders of the Putrescent Meat
05 Goat Thron
06 At Last Came the Time of Execution
07 Kristallnacht
08 Kill Invalid Target Part II
09 Crisis
10 The barbed wire mutilating, like Satan rape the carrion of the cross
11 Mutilation Yourself but More
12 Gas Chamber Religion
13 Outro

It’s amazing sometimes how much appearances can deceive and fool you into thinking that something is one thing when in fact it turns out to be nothing like you imagined it to be. Such was the case when I received this present disc to review – the cover screamed out BLACK/DEATH METAL to me but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that instead it turned out to be the darkest of extremely dark ambient, mixed with noise, industrial and a smidgeon of martial; still, having said that though, it is actually imbued with the spirit of black and death metal even so, what with its references to religion and Satan. This CD collects assorted tracks which originally appeared on three demos the band recorded in 2005 (‘Totaler Krieg’, ‘Delight of Evil’ and ‘Kill Invalid Target’) and it turns out to be something of a hellishly big beast.

This is one of those releases that positively blasts out and revels in its bitter black hatred and poisonous misanthropy, bludgeoning and overwhelming the listener remorselessly and relentlessly. This is a sound-painting of a Hell composed entirely of machines and contraptions engineered with but one single purpose in mind: that of stripping the soul from the fleshly vehicle in order to rape it and then in turn flensing the flesh from the bones and finally extracting the marrow, and to do all this with the maximum amount of pain possible while the victim is still very much alive. Moreover, the deeper you go into the levels of this particular conception of Hell, the more devilish and infernal (and more pain-inducing) the machines. The images conjured up by this are deeply unpleasant and I would say that not even the sickest imaginings or base creativity of the torturers of the infamous Inquisition could possibly conceive of anything more depraved, sordid and blood-spattered than the scenario dragged out of Goat Thron’s skulls.

The sound fills your head, inserting itself into every level of mind-function, from the primitive reptilian brain through to the subconscious and thence into the conscious. Concomitantly Goat Thron use every point on the audio spectrum from the lowest of gut-churning granular bass rumbles right through to teeth-grinding head-screwing sonic screeches in order to get their acidic bile across. I can’t even imagine what species of instruments they use, the sound is so big, space-engulfing and pulverising that it is easy to think that they couldn’t possibly be using anything normal; instead it feels like they utilise gargantuan engines and mechanical contrivances the size of your average city-block and which are of their own devious devising in order to extract that much power and strength out of their sound and invest it with such venom. It’s a wonder that the recording equipment managed to survive the holocaust that is Goat Thron when committing this to tape.

I was mightily impressed with this; this is just the thing to scare the neighbours, insurance salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses with, and send them scurrying for the hills; the Apocalypse has finally hit us but there ain’t gonna be no Rapture, people. There’s only problem with it that I can see: now I just have to find a sound-system big enough to both cope with the power on display and to do it adequate justice