The first track starts off with an eerie ambient intro
that made me imagine some bizarre scene of dolphins working in a factory.
Then, as the drums gradually become louder, all is still just for an instant.
Any fan of this kind of stuff knows what's coming next: a searing and
chaotic maelstrom of noisy black metal hatred.
The formula previously offered indeed describes a
lot of the tracks on Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan, as there
really ain't a whole lot of difference from song to song. While this would
be a flaw in other genres of music, this aspect contributes to making
Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan an excellent album of raw black
metal.
As an insightful friend once remarked, extreme metal
sometimes gets to a point where it's so fast, harsh, distorted, and just
noisy, that the line is blurred in terms of what is music and what is
ambient. This is indeed how this album should be enjoyed; the tracks are
to be looked at equally as songs but also as pieces of sonic energy.
While the style of black metal that this French band
plays can be thought of as of the necro school, it simultaneously has
a good amount of low end. This decision was a good one as the bass drum
thumps and scaly bass do even more to bolster the malevolence. The vocals
are for the most part in a rasped black metal style, but occasionally
a deathgrowl is used to effectively punctuate the music.
I could go on and on about why black metal fans should
get this, but if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get something sharp
and listen to Antaeus.
