Rating: 7.5

Country: Sweden

Release Date: 2006

Record Label: Total Holocaust Records

Track list:
1. Liothe
2. Bevingad Och Försedd Med Horn
3. Dionyssosinitiationen
4. Prosairesis
5. Infusco Ignis

Total playing time 27:43

Band Website: Heresi

Heresi - Psalm II - Infusco Ignis

Skampher - Everything

There are times when I want to hear some of the most highly innovative material possible within black metal, material that will push the genre forward into new realms of musical iniquity. At other times, I just want a nice, traditional slab of unholy black metal. Heresi easily fulfills the latter itch, but it's most definitely good enough to be more than a mere temporary novelty to be eventually discarded and tossed on the generic norks arisk wannabe pile.

Heresi is the work of one man going by the name of Skamfer, who actually used to be in Ondskapt, back when they still made great, macabre music, instead of the easily digestible black ‘n roll pap they produce now. You can tell they lost a great member when Skampfer went his own way, but it's all for the best, since Heresi creates some truly crushing material. Skamfer wears his influences on his proverbial sleeve: Darkthrone and Gorgoroth spring to mind as Heresi's distant ancestors, but works by Clandestine Blaze, early Deathspell Omega, Armagedda, early Watain and Haemoth are far more relevant. And this is what sets Heresi apart from the reams of ‘darkclones' creating screechy, self-pitying, trebly fumbling passing itself off as Satan's music. Like the influences mentioned above, Heresi takes the old norse black metal template, dumps it into a container of toxic sludge, adds handfuls of rusty nails into it, straps timed charges to the assembly, and tosses the thing into a daycare centre.

Heresi's black metal is heavy, filthy, cruel and malicious, laughing heartily at the suffering of others while basking in its own perversion. The first thing giving this away is the sound and production. Produced, as usual for a current Swedish band, at Necromorbus, the whole thing is covered by a thick layer of grit. Bass has a very noticeable presence, rumbling in the background like a passing tank, the guitars cut like a rusty knife, the drums pound away like a rain of bombshells and Skamfer's vocals are low and guttural, barking out commands with demonic intensity.

The riffs and arrangements themselves, while they could be placed in the tradition of Darkthrone and Gorgoroth, sound far more actively malicious, scathing and even mocking than those venerable two predecessors are usually capable of. This is not music for the self-pitying recluse, this is music for the happy serial-killer. This does not aim for nostalgia for a lost age, or lamenting the crappy state of the world, this album seems to actually revel in the horrors of reality, laughing at the worms trying and failing to make something good of it, while doing everything in its power to make things worse than they already are. Not out of some misplaced sense of anger, since these riffs sound far too celebratory for that, but simply because it enjoys doing so. These arrangements employ such an amount of infectious hooks and segments that outright rock, that they seems to invite you to join in the debauchery, to enjoy the torturing of so-called innocents right along with them. Unlike crappier outfits like later Shining, Heresi does not want you dead, it wants you to become like itself.

So, on the one hand, this is good, old-fashioned black metal, but on the other hand it sets itself apart from most of the bands falling under that umbrella by being outright nastier and filthier than them, while simultaneously knowing how to have a damned good time and feeling immensely good about itself at the expense of the rest of the human race. No depression here, just contempt and vitriol. If you fancy yourself the type that kicks beggars down and chuckles when seeing Nazi deathcamp documentaries, then you could do worse than tracking down a copy of this piece of venom put to plastic.

November 30th, 2006