Aborym
Kali Yuga Bizarre
World War III Records
Aborym are everything that lesser bands like Cradle of Filth wish they could be: a concentrated whirlwind of madness and nail-biting confusion, the sounds echoing off of H.P. Lovecraft’s skull, house music for cannibals. Kali Yuga Bizarre is black metal taken to a final organic extreme; truly terrifying pagan, technoid-worshipping drug cults hailing the end times.
“Wehrmacht Kali Ma” immerses itself in cross-cultural taboos, featuring an inspired performance by vocalist Attila Csihar, whipping from throat-tearing screams to manic-speaking in tongues, ricocheting off the waves of frostbitten guitar and white noise programming. “Horrenda Peccata Christi” is an aural nightmare that seems to bend the very fabric of sound into perverse twists and curves (like glass melting), and there’s a cool disorienting breakbeat interlude, along with a sick Glenn Benton-in-_The Exorcist_ chanted section. Beautiful. “Hellraiser” is an altogether more cinematic affair, relying mostly on a melancholy, restrained tapestry of synthesized sounds, reminding one of an old Full Moon soundtrack, with Attila chiming in with some truly tormented vocals.
“Roma Divina Urbs” starts out with samples of what sounds like a brain-damaged Renaissance fair minstrel, before breaking into epic spires of blackened metal, broken up by grandiose cathedral organ and chants of the faithful. The whole thing sounds way bigger, both in terms of sound and ambition, than underground metal could ever be. It straddles centuries of devotional music into a sprawling mass of dark beauty. The total high point of the album, and of Aborym’s career thus far, “Tantra Bizarre” channels the drug and pain-encrusted remains of Skinny Puppy’s “Too Dark Park” into a visceral gash of overloaded electronics and raw, claustrophic vocal scratching. Wondrous.
“Come Thou Long Expected Jesus” begins like a Catholic mass, but is interrupted by what must presumably be a blasphemous rant in Italian, even as the choir still sings along placidly, like good sheep do. Serpentine electronic convulsions bring the matter to a close. “Metal Stricken Terror Action” starts out as a brute fist to the face before abruptly shifting into intricate synth cages, over which Attila flays himself to bits, sounding eerily like Robert Smith on his deathbed. “The First Four Trumpets” is a thrashy burst underpinned by a synth line that is strangely reminiscent of one of the spookier themes from Twin Peaks and moans and shrieks and incantations from Attila – the repetition is hypnotic. This is not music, this is much more sinister and powerful magick.
Only for the evolved.
World War III Records: http://www.ww3music.com
