Rating: 8.5

Country: Finland

Release Date: 2007

Record Label: Northern Heritage

Track list:
1. Disturbed By Spiritual Tormentors 2. Eternal Woman (Hell Of Your Love) 3. The Vision Remains
4. Initation Interrupted
5. Death Of The Feeble Masses
6. Crush The King Of Snakes
7. We Rise Above
8. Commands From The Antichrist
9. Crawl In The Mud
10. Erotic Needs In Emotional Void

Contact: n/a

Ride for Revenge - The King of Snakes

Harald Mentor - Instruments, Vocals
Spirit Krusher - Instruments

Some names are evocative enough to say more about music than a pithy writer like myself ever could. Ride For Revenge; three short words that conjure images as dramatic as a mechanical death machine killing everything the driver ever hated. Pretty hard to beat, but I'll try.

First, I'm torn as to whether or not I should call this black metal. Some of the songs sound like the more barren, sludgy movements of Beherit's Drawing Down The Moon slowed waaaay down on bass boost, but I'd sooner call this percussive tribal doom than anything. The framework of The King of Snakes is a juxtaposition of downtuned bass rumble that brings to mind the likes of Corrupted & Sunn O))) and deceptively subtle shifting drum patterns, draped in noisy sheets of synth. Every song deliberately plows ahead with a gloriously stretched out riff in hypnotic repetition, with a strangely satisfying burst of feedback resounding after almost every note. Harald's vocals resemble gruffly intoned incantations, sometimes carrying what could be called a tune, only to collapse back into a rattling death grunt moments later. He doesn't try to draw attention to himself, which would be a vain prospect anyway in light of the asphyxiating sludge he narrates.

I normally accuse synth in this kind of music of being superfluous, but it's a central element of the songs on The King of Snakes; its organic, etherous nature provides a much-needed sense of contrast to the rigidity of the dismal shamanistic doom the instruments summon. Bubbling around with an almost aquatic tone in "Initation (sic) Interrupted" and resembling an air-raid siren in "Erotic Needs in Emotional Void", it's a consistently amorphous blur, yet utterly distinct from any I've heard before in metal.

It's easy to tell The King of Snakes is great stuff is because it's so hard to find reference points to describe it, but not because it's musically vague. On the contrary, its singularity of purpose isn't diluted by any parlor tricks or smoke. Ride For Revenge's ritualistic grandeur has that pure, unfiltered presence one can feel upon hearing any great band. An entrancing and crushing debut from an act with a promising future.

October 16th, 2007