Rating: 9.5
Country: Finland
Release Date: 2005
Record Label: Werewolf Records
Track list:
1. Bones in the Dungeon
2. A Cave Full of Corpse Lanterns
3. Fire and Flame
4. Song for the Deadwood
5. Feuer und Stahl
6. Violencia
7. Diabolical Plague
8. The Snakes of the Earth pt. II
9. Exekutioner of the Final Solution
10. Above the Ziggurat They Dance
11. Transformation
12. Our Feast of Victory
13. Reversion to an Ancient Form
14. Clouds of Doom Gather...
15. Dawnfires at the Lake
16. A Beastcults Procession
Total playing time 01:17:57
Band Website: Dead Reptile Shrine |
Dead Reptile Shrine - A Journey Through the Darkest of Forests
[All members - Anonymous]
The Nietzschean proclamation of "God is dead" begins A Journey Through the Darkest of Forests, an assertion that's hard to argue with in light of the material presented on this disc. I know Yahweh is notoriously apathetic to human affairs, but if he existed, I can't imagine him allowing something like this to be produced.
Let it be known that my score does not, in the least, reflect this band's instrumental or compositional aptitude. On a professional and musical level, these guys are fucking horrible. A Journey Through the Darkest of Forests is riddled with audible fuckups & skeletal compositions, and contains a rhythm section that can best be described as an array of sloppy, stumbling nonrhythms. So why the high score? The band's talent isn't the point. The anonymous members of Dead Reptile Shrine are either genius or borderline retarded. Imagine the genre-bending antics of Misantropical Painforest, except way more fucked up; combine that with the forest folk of Avarus swirling with fits of psychedelic improv irreverence, make the frontman half black metal vocalist, half bawling infant, half shamanic chanter (the math there makes about as much sense as this album), and that's essentially Dead Reptile Shrine. To give a less contrived description, the album's general glitched out tribal metal aesthetic can almost be seen as fully realized interpretation of Beherit's Messe Des Morts and the ambient parts of Drawing Down the Moon, albeit more experimental and damaged, with subtle Austrian undertones.
A Journey Through the Darkest of Forests is a collection of songs recorded between 2001-05 at "various locations," so it's bloated like a drowning victim, running the gamut from the riffs that are barely discernible in their rawness to drug-addled in their delivery, and from mellow and folky in the most apocalyptic way fathomable to improvisational chaos that somehow all manages to converge and sweep together into a dissonant drone; not so much in your typical dirgey Burzum kind, but in more of an Abruptum-esque manner that evokes that freaked out bliss that jazz musicians have reported to experience at their zenith of playing -- which isn't to say this is more of a high-concept exercise in postmodern abstraction than a metal album; even Dead Reptile Shrine's most standard, right-field stuff is pretty good. Songs like "Feuer und Stahl" are as competent as anything from Behexen's catalogue, while "Exekutioner[sic] of the Final Solution" and "Our Feast of Victory" tap into some propulsive riffage that isn't so much black as it is simply metal, albeit crumbling, lo-fi, discordant and howled, like Abruptum covering Sanctuary in the forest with amps and mics hung on trees.
The folk material initially provides a lulling contrast to the idiosyncratic black metal it sandwiches with deliberate steel string guitar plucking and crooned vocals, but as the album progresses, the non-metal elements begin mutating into something weirder and scarier. The band begins incorporating abrasively shrieking flutes, throbbing trance beats, and liturgical chanting interwoven with heavily accented spoken-word poetry into their soundscape, and when the album fluctuates back into metal, you actually feel respite. The transition between these styles is perhaps too visible for the good of the seamless atmosphere of runic decay Dead Reptile Shrine attempt to create, but on the other hand, that means the recording contains an album's worth of isolated black metal material and an album's worth of isolated ambient folk material (rather than a boiling pot of the two). While the black metal's fine, I would like to hear the band put down their electric guitars more, as that's when they're most creative. For instance, that artificial falsetto overtone accompanying the throat singing in the minimalist tribal jam "A Beastcult's Procession" is actually a harmonic effect called quintina -- this is the first time I've heard a metal band even attempt something like that.
Although I don't believe Dead Reptile Shrine are NSBM, their aesthetic does carry the baggage of Nazi connotations (just look at the album cover, it's right there). It shouldn't really matter; countless black metal bands sing about the involuntary extinction of the human race, raping the corpses of the inferior humans and using their hollowed skulls to drink blended infants, etc. But when this glib misanthropy is directed at a particular group of people? "It's none of my business if 14 Israelis were killed by a Palestinian bomb today. Wait, what? A European metal band doesn't like Jews? Alert the tolerance police!" And suddenly every armchair progressive in a fifty mile radius turns into fucking Spiderman. Whether or not it matters if the lyrics are theater or actual propaganda is another IQ gas chamber of a debate entirely, but the point is, if Nazi ideology deeply offends you, you may want to give this a pass.
A Journey Through the Darkest of Forests is the epitome of acquired taste. It basically boils down to this: Avarus travel back in time and share some of their drugs with Beherit: yes*/no**?
*Listen to Dead Reptile Shrine.
** Go home.
March 15th, 2008
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