Krieg - The Black Plague
Review: Levelled to the ground, Krieg is what occurs when humans thrust their indescribable psyche into making cryptic but resonantly familiar and natural music, creating often improvisationally to render power chords and noise into a flowing continuity of sound. In this compilation of early and eBay-inflated rarities what shows most of the Krieg mythos is its obsession with making an alienated pop music to fill the void with careless yet comprehensively synthesized sonic shapes of metaphorical and thematic significance, synergizing elements of radiant similarity to render around the listener a cloak of suspension of disbelief and all social law above primal opposition.
Like a flaring of noise in distant catacombs the roar of guitar guides each song into its passages and intersections, suspended in the forward urgency of throatshaking drumming and achieving a momentum through connective ingenuity which deepens immersion in the symbols and fragments of mapping that Krieg use to create riff families. Themes blossom and decay amidst the constant hollow explosion muffled like the existence of humans in a technological society, allowing the voice to emerge and twist emphasis at junctures to maintain its dark aura.
Vocalizations ranging from the most civilized scream to a primitive, undogmatized shriek form the visible solidity of this music, placing complex and often improvised passages into a context of texture and tonal suggestion which anchors them and allows their developmental contributions to augment the music. Chord voicings vary to the dissonant at essential points and black metal power strum technique fuses harmony to central narrative. While interludes populate this disk, its intensity is enough to keep attention to music throughout.
As black metal was born, partly of artistic impulse of the highest intent and partly of a corrupt put-on like genre namers Venom, Krieg is a surging organic chaos of varying merits and strengths which when at full vitality spews its disgust with rancid vocals and pugilistic stringed mayhem. Its world once entered projects an epic of noble intensity rising from the mundane disorder and conflict populating the subconscious landscape of human knowledge.