Mhorgl - Antinomian (2010)

www.myspace.com/mhorgl

I want to start here by explaining that I am really not the man to be reviewing this album. No matter how good the music, there is still something in me that is repelled by the Satanic, even when I know the people in the bands aren't sacrificing cats before going on stage. A lingering vestige of my religious indoctination as a child perhaps, or maybe my own sense of mortality eating at me, who can say? Either way, I have long avoided the genre, but one can't be an honest reviewer and shy away from that which makes you uncomfortable, so until someone steps forth to review such material in my stead, it is me you are stuck with, with all my confused morality and spiritual scarring.

Extreme blackmetal is definately an acquired taste due to its overwhelming bleakness and sense of inconsolable despair. If you can get past this, you find a Metal genre dominated by music engineered to be nasty to the point of discomfort and all too often with an extremely unrefined recording quality. The sound is caustic in its abrasiveness, but there is a constancy to the patterns that are generally easy to follow and have a tendency towards chord or scale based changes, albeit played at high speed. Too grim to mosh to, it is Metal associated with ghastly corpsepaint, Satanic lyrical content, medievil armour, burning churches and Norwegian murderers.

Mhorgl seem to have given this bloody and glacial form of Metal some thought. They have taken a very interesting approach to reinventing the genre, it is like they have taken Black Metal at its direst and most forbidding, stuck it in a shopping bag and shook the fuck out of it. The bits that worked their way through the plastic they seem to have said "right, lets use those bits" and fucked off everything else. Corpsepaint and other hackneyed dramatic histronics rejected, the music they have chosen to procede with has being refined and distorted until it is hideously different and calamitously unique. In making these sacrifices they seem to have stripped their genre of foolish parody and injected a certain flavour of credibility to it.

The blast beats are there and fast indeed they are - it could not be true Black Metal without them - but in true Louis style they are enhanced by explosive changes and flurries of exuberant rolls. This is very Louis stuff, the style and sound could be straight from Pagan or Furor, but in Mhorgl his drumwork is not overshot with his vocals and that somehow changes the whole feel of his performance, at least for me. In this day of gravity blasting masters and ultra fast handwork, speed alone is not that impressive to me, but when Louis turns away from the snare and starts working the toms he really shows that there is still a few laps in the old horse yet.

The blackened guitars tones are there, but stripped of the incoherance and excessive noise that epitomises the Black Metal sound, and with that cleanup went the simplicity and predictability. Musically, melody still exists in the guitar structures but it is often horrific and twisted melody, dischordant and uncomfortable to the brain. It churns around like an eel, sometimes hard to follow and generally impossible to pre-empt, sharply angled changes violently lash the ears. Little guitar squeals and bizarre chords pop up here and there, and it could sound hogdepodge and fragmented if it wasn't for the exemplary basswork holding it together with the strength of Liquid Nails. Even so, there are times when the choice of dischordant notes can be so far out of the key with the bass that it is hard to know whether it is a deliberate distortion of the comfort zone or in fact a wrong note, so being as Rob is a guitar veteran I will assume he is simply making a deliberate and concerted effort to kill me.

Sam on vocals does what he has always done, delivering abrasive black metal vocals with no real variation to speak of. His style is unrelenting raspy black metal shrieking generally drawn out and sinister sounding. His vocals work very well on "Antinomian" and with Mhorgl in general, where there is no need or desire for anything subtle or tuneful and he can just scream his box off, something he is a master at. I am very pleased to see Sam finally find a home at long last.

In between the violence and raw speed and dark energy there are some moments when Mhorgl slow it down a bit, even produce some unconventional timing structures. They even back off from the heaviness in rare moments, although the discomfort of the music increases yet further in these interludes. The middle section of Song 3 "Iron Clad Destruction" is one of these moments when they do this, but there are sections like this scattered throughout the CD. In fact half of song 7 "The Paean of Hangatyr" is done this way, discomfort layered on top of discomfort to create a Hellish new level, poisonous black and Godless.

It is like they are allowing a pencil-thin ray of sunshine into the album but then the twisted nature of the music takes to it like weeds invading and choking a patch of flowers, and the blackness takes hold again with its stigian claws. It has the effect of making the song as a whole that much more bleak and desperate sounding, and if it is intended it is very well done, but if not then I worry for their collective sanity. To me, Mhorgl's "Antinomian" sounds like very dark and evil music, sacrilegous and ghastly. This image is further enhanced by the absurd antireligious imagery on the cover and Satanic symbolism on the back and CD itself. Being an advanced copy there is no booklet to look through, but I suspect the theme will be repeated throughout.

Ok, here it is in brief: "Antinomian" is definately better than a most of the black metal I have heard over the last 5 years, but to me it is a little like comparing torture devices and deciding which one you wish to be tortured by. There are plenty of you who love the darkness of such material for the same reason I am creeped out by it, and to them I say that you will not be disappointed. This is music to defile holy places to, and if that what makes your blood pump then it is definately worth a listen.

Review by Jez.