Behexen- By The Blessing Of Satan (2004)

I know I'm in a slump when my queue of albums to listen to balloons to over 300...it's well beyond that right now. Time to get my ass in gear and listen to some new music, but first here's one from the archives.

This album sounds like shit. It's one of the least dynamic albums I've ever heard. Everything is ridiculously loud and pushed to the front of the "mix." It's super abrasive and over the course of it's 47 minutes, this album will fatigue your ears. I think that's  one of the reasons why I rank it among the best black metal albums of the 2000's.

The other reason why I rank it so highly is that it's an absolute blasterpiece and a total riff-fest. The production perfectly compliments the music in this case, it's slightly over three quarters of an hour of unchecked aggression and this aggression will stand, man. It's got tremolo picked riffs and blastbeats until the cows come home and gnarly high pitched wails abound. Behexen aren't really interested subtlety or mood-setting on this record. No, they're more interested in grabbing you by the hair and holding your face to a belt sander whirring at 3400 rotations per minute until the air is filled with a fine mist of blood and bone dust. If that sounds like the type of thing you would enjoy, you should definitely check this record out (I'm looking at you, James).

Oh, and bonus points for one of the best black metal album covers ever.

Try it.

This album is out of print, but you can pick up a copies from Discogs:

CD (Discogs)

Vinyl (Discogs)

Vinyl Fetish: Yob - The Unreal Never Lived and The Illusion of Motion Review

I gleefully ordered both of these albums at a ridiculously high price ($35). Granted some of that glee was due to the fact that I ordered them on my phone after having been at the bar for 6 or so hours, but the overwhelming majority of it was because my two favorite Yob albums were finally being pressed on vinyl. A week plus a few days later when I finally sat down to listen to them however, I was somewhat less gleeful. No, they're not bottom barrel pressings with pixelated artwork that sound like garbage (though the "etching" on side D of The Illusion of Motion is pretty pathetic). They're bare minimum pressings by a label that unceremoniously dropped the band years ago. This price gouging pressing is simply about cashing in on the popularity boom Yob has enjoyed with the release of their last two albums. There was no passion or care or even any real effort put into pressing these albums. Yet, I bought them. I thought about spending the rest of this post hurling invective at the major label with a roster full of lowest common denominator dreck that put these out. Instead, I'm going to celebrate the fact that two of my favorite doom records got the vinyl treatment at last. Kind of.