Blasphemy - Gods of War
Review: Tragic as it is fierce and naturalistically lawless, this album of surging chaos in black metal hymns is crafted from the feral configurations of grindcore riffing and a narrative structural sense of melody that while not harmoniously melodic focuses listener attention on the coherence between a progression of blinding fury in speed riffs culminating in detonations of compiled tensions. Blurring oscillations of power in tremolo architectures connecting pseudopods of harmony in structure reaching from the obscurity of chromatic riffs distorting in collision of percussion and strings on emphasis, the voice of this songwriting style makes lucidity from broken fragments hopelessly flung into randomness and slowly assembling into sense.
Lifelike in its organic use of dynamic variation in hook and structure, even within the similar form of blasting grinding hybrid metal which in slamming power chord structures binds rhythm to lyrical voice of guitar tonal progression and from that opens an evolving and developing design of morbidity in encounters with nothingness in dark existential isolation. Gutwrenched expulsions of air and insane howling carry rhythms embedded within song through cryptic and understated counterpoint; instrumentalism while not technical is reasonably precise and effortlessly careless when the noise needs of more obscure compositional detours require reverberant trailing noise in textures of dense complexity.
Although in essence fervently urgent and apocalyptic music, the work of Blasphemy reveals its more complicated underlying emotional and philosophical conception in the emergence of forms contrary to the immediate as fundamental principles of the physics of each song, forming the basics of harmony and melodic continuity through nihilistic atonal riffing. Turbulent umbrage fomenting in the synchronization at resonant intervals of speed of strumming and speed of tonal change ignites the descent into buffeting explosions and a convergence of phenomena to form reverberant fragments of tone creating a background of resonance through which shape of motion through space of note harmony undulates in changing complementary oppositional halves.
When this album emerged within the forefront of black metal legions it forced a recognition of the primitive and elemental in underground music and resurrected within the genre emphasis on epic confrontation in all details of song no matter how simple, varying from the simplistic repetitive structures that prevailed in most other aggressive music. Unbowed to anything, this album demonstrates its concept in theory and practice as fusion in the rendering of this album, a testament to the majesty of primal noise.