Rating: 9.0

Country: USA

Release Date: 2007

Record Label: AIDS Needle Records

Track list:
1. Die You Fucking Scum
2. Stabbed With An AIDS Needle
3. Homicidal Halloween Night
4. Cervix Ripping Sex
5. Scum Terror
6. Armageddon Rape Rampage
7. Black Labyrinth
8. Seraphim Slaughter
9. To Cataclysmic Path
10. I'm The Unholy Motherfucking Master

Total playing time 34:34

Contact: Seraphim Slaughter

Seraphim Slaughter - Scum Terror

Creepo - Vocals
Carnifex - Guitars
Archduke Odnanref - Bass
Christ Von Kieck - Drums

Abortion; manual expulsion of a fetus from the uterus, or too slow and inefficient? AIDS; a disease, or a cure for mankind? Rape; a form of sexual assault, or just hilarious? Hippies; lingering societal splotches of a dead subculture, or potential biological fuel for robots that swallow orphans and shit global warming? If you answered the latter for each of these questions, stop reading this right now and buy this album. Seraphim Slaughter is a band who have clearly jumped the metal standard of naked disdain, straight to the point of the beautifully universal language of mockery and abuse. But instead of merely resorting to it, they raise it to an art form with their brand of equally repugnant blackened thrash. They're renaissance men, if you will, of spitting on your value system, taste in music, and political beliefs.

While the sonic framework of Scum Terror reeks of the retrogressive punk-gone-horribly-wrong attitude of Darkthrone's most recent albums and irreverent uproar of Nattefrost's solo project, some of the more sloppy black thrash riffs wouldn't be out of place on a Bestial Mockery release. Despite this, Seraphim Slaughter make no attempt to subdue the discordant second wave Norwegian black metal influences (Carpathian Forest, Gorgoroth, etc.) in their music, harvesting them in passages of sublime buzz to complement the buzzsaw thrashing rather than vainly trying to disguise them. The genre crossbreeding is especially effective when they eschew thrashy power chords in favor of decadent swaths of tremolo picking stretched out over spastic, garage punk skinpounding, effortlessly summoning the depraved bliss black metal once gasped in and out of its withered lungs -- even if Seraphim Slaughter has more to do with gas masks and dead prostitutes than grim forests or whatever. Subtlety's not a word these guys know when navigating their influences, either. The spidery, sub-zero intro of the title track feels like a lost De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas song, then, out of nowhere, you're bitchslapped with a riff that could put Sodom's Agent Orange to shame.

Despite the vein-bulging speed and intensity of songs like "Stabbed With an AIDS Needle", (probably my new favorite song title, by the way) Seraphim Slaughter know when to come screeching to a spark-shooting crawl, with a crusty doom/sludge element I sincerely hope they explore more later. For instance, the climax of "To Cataclysmic Path" is notable for its gritty Khanate-esque jumble of convulsing, repetitive Hellhammerish bends. The punk element of Scum Terror sort of lurks in the gutter in the form of a deeply refractive attitude and a lack of solos, but it's not so pronounced that it interferes with the listening experience of someone who dislikes punk rock like myself. Creepo candidly narrates this sordid kaleidoscope of profanity with atonal shriek after atonal shriek. His pronounciation is too damn fast to understand everything he says without the lyrics in front of you, but his comprehensible delivery of charming lines like "I've only just begun to rape your fucking ass" cements this as a fun album to play loudly in your car when driving past daycares.

For the most part, Seraphim Slaughter play with tongue planted firmly in cheek with lyrics about AIDS, masculine posturing, bombing concerts, and of course, lines like "trick-or-treat, you fucking queer!" The lyrics almost reach a level of profoundness at times, displaying a sense of [seemingly accidental] cultural awareness and contempt for the artificiality of North American life -- but the key word here is "almost," as it doesn't take long before Creepo dives back from punk anarchism that would look more natural on a Leftover Crack album than in metal, into screaming about ripping cervixes and spreading AIDS. Not that I'm complaining; to paraphrase Bill Hicks, life is an amusement park ride. I laughed audibly more than a couple times while listening to this, and not in a retarded Gwar way that compromises sheer headbangability for chuckles.

Max Stirner believed that as the walls of the church expand, the egoist resides on the outside, searching for the little left that is profane. However, the church's walls cannot be stopped, and those who choose to remain alien to what those divine barriers encompass will inevitably be pushed off the edge into absolute nothingness when there is nothing left for God's hand to consume. So, he thought, one should storm the gates, consume the sacred, and make it his own. But if you wish to linger outside those walls starving for the warm embrace of vulgarity until you're pushed into the infernal depths of that yawning abyss, you can't go wrong with Scum Terror. This is hedonistic metal that will take off your head and do unwholesome things to it in the basement from a band that will probably think I'm a tremendous faggot after reading this review.

November 9th, 2007