Rating: 3.0

Country: USA

Release Date: 2005

Record Label: Acid Victim Records

Track list:
1. Curse Of The Ghoul
2. Burn The Churches
3. Long Dead Fuck
4. Death, Black And Formless
5. As Below So Above

Total playing time: 16:47

Contact: n/a

Deadhole - Curse of the Ghoul

Trash - Vocals
Creepshow - Bass
Cancer - Drums
Beast - Guitars

A friend of mine's father works in a local prison. At one point he told me about a prisoner named "Trash," who was apparently some sort of freak necrophile heavily into bodymod. I was told that had two horns, filed teeth, a forked tongue, a split penis, a "666" tattoo on his forehead, among many other "modifications." From what I recall, he got sentenced a year or so for engaging in some juvenile blood ritual, and punching a girl in the face at a bar. Trash eventually became somewhat of an in-joke between us, as we imagined him doing every-day things like getting gas or buying coffee.

Clerk: Do you want cream or sugar with that?
Trash: Black.
Clerk: Alright, thank y-
Trash: Like the necrotic pit of my soul.
Clerk: Okay, then, have a nice day.
Trash: Have you tasted the foetid anus of God as I have, coffee merchant?
Clerk: You're holding up the line, so I'm going to have to ask you to get off the counter.
Trash: Non serviam.

Anyway, I was in a record store a while ago, thumbing through new releases, and I noticed what appeared to be a cheap demo from a local act called Deadhole. On the back of the booklet, above a message that read "DEADHOLE HATES YOU!", the lead singer was listed as "Trash." Although the name aroused memories of the prison ghoul whose ill-repute I was so familar with, I knew that lots of black metal artists adopted self-deprecating pseudonyms like "cunt" and "necroyetishit 666," so I wasn't entirely convinced. Still, I was a little more than intrigued, and at any rate, found it to be a good opportunity to hear what Maine has to offer for black metal.

But onto the music. Think G.G. Allin and early Mayhem's most mediocre moments, and the outlandishly morbid histrionics of Carpathian Forest, all compressed into a semen-dripping mutant of a blackened groove metal album. Yes, I said groove metal. Sure, there are a few second wave black metal tremolo melodies we've all heard countless times predictably scattered about, but for the most part, discordant groove-based riffs dominate Curse of The Ghoul. When I say "groove," I mean the bad kind of groove; think 90's mainstream shit like Pantera or Machine Head, but with asinine arpeggiated fills and more open strings. It works at times, such as in the title track's infectious opening riff, but Deadhole is unable to maintain any interesing level of songwriting for long.

Where Deadhole succeeds is when they actually focus. Like near the end of "As Below So Above", Cancer begins engaging in militant snare rolls under the guitarist's long stretches of seasick buzz. Suddenly the dirgey lead melody breaks away, and the drums and rhythm guitar synchronize, ending the album on the note of a martial death-march. The grooving bass breaks are also rather enjoyable, perfectly suited for this kind of music. Moments like these are surprisingly effective, but the music is generally such an ambiguous, untight blur that an extremely smudged lense perpetually disables you from fully appreciating them. Another contributing factor are the vocals -- Trash's unimpressive growls are drenched in static, as if he had the mic pressed against his tonsils while recording. Adding insult to injury, they're way too high in the mix, often completely smothering the instruments' audibility. The obtrusively shitty production also doesn't help; all of this swirls around in a lo-fi fuzz, as if the band got lost in a particularly rousing game of Scrabble and had to record their music on an answering machine five minutes before they were scheduled to get the tape to their distributor.

Although this is unrelated to the music, I thought it deserved its own paragraph: "Cancer," the drummer, actually has cancer. I wish more musicians would name themselves after their afflictions. Tom Araya could rename himself "Midlife Crisis," the entirety of Dimmu Borgir could change their names to "AIDS", etc.

Overall, I don't see who Curse of The Ghoul could possibly appeal to. Do you like Impaled Nazarene, but wish they'd slow down and adopt the compositional competence of Terri Schiavo? Didn't think so. While its clandestine demographic may be part of its esoteric charm, this demo's still a piece of North-Eastern shit from a band with barely lukewarm potential.

October 16th, 2007