Kill - Inverted Funeral

Rating: 7.5

Country: Sweden

Release Date: 2007

Track list:
1. Inverted Funeral
2. Deathmessiah
3. Morbid Curse
4. Of Anger
5. Below
6. Summoning Of Flames
7. Violent Devastation
8. Anti-cosmic Thunderstorm

Total playing time   42:37

Band Website: Kill

Kill - Inverted Funeral

Carl Warslaughter - Vocals
J. Voltage - Guitar
Gorgorium - Bass & Guitar
Getaz - Drums

I know what you're thinking: a metal band.

Named Kill.

Geez, that has to be the most original name in music since the punk group called Anarchy.

Even the album title is pretty bad. Inverted Funeral? Really? And with its Morbid(Sweden)-esque bat wing band logo and embarrassing pencil sketch cover art of an impaled priest, everything about this album screams some obscure Scandinavian metal fossil from the late '80s. Considering those factors and their Darkthrone playbook riffs and lyrics about Satan & death, one could conjecture that Kill are, as a musical entity, grossly generic. And while you wouldn't be wrong, that's sort of the point; to Kill, cultivating cheesy black metal cliches is practically a lost art form.

I mentioned a Darkthrone influence, but it's important to note that Kill echoes the band's earliest black metal material more than the ubiquitous reference point that is Transilvanian Hunger. To the uninitiated, that basically means you should expect slightly more Bathory and Celtic Frost than Burzum. It's still distinctly second wave black metal, rife with winding tremolo riffs, clicky blastbeats, narrative songwriting (there are almost no recurring musical themes in the first song, what the fuck?) and Ildjarn-esque buzz, but the album's habitual thrashiness and acrobatic bass presence occasionally leads me to believe this album was intended to be generic black metal for people who hate generic black metal due to it not being metal enough. e.g., I'd venture to assume, most DC readers.

Alright then, what separates this from a million other bands adhering to the same oldschool, corpsepainted agenda? First, the vocalist is quite awesome. He often reminds me of Malign's singer, with a mid-ranged bestial groan that's enunciated so furtively that what he's doing is often more of a gravelly croon than a growl. Second, Inverted Funeral may be barbed, drenched in feedback, clickety-clack and "kvlt" as hell, but its retroactive thrashiness is often belied by a groovy melodic sensibility assisted by merrily thumping bass. It's a bit sad that not completely mixing out bass in black metal is considered a virtue rather than an expectation these days, but maybe that will change if more bands stop sniffing glue, follow Kill's lead and, you know, maybe have some fun writing music.

This band's difficult to recommend to anyone who enjoys so-and-so band or so-and-so genre because it occupies a host of black metal's musical extremes without pledging loyalty to any of them, but if I had to draw some comparisons, this should be a no-brainer for fans of Bestial Mockery and Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. At any rate, they're raw as fuck and kick midgets to the moon (don't worry, I can safely mock midgets here; they can't reach the Internet), so don't let the conceptual homogeneity dissuade you from checking them out if you need a fix of retro Swedish black metal that doesn't suck.

July 10th, 2008