One From The Grave: Ugra Karma
June 16 2008 at 06:41:59 AM
The Destroyer. Sword in hand, steadied atop his tiger throne. Shiva, great lord, whose attributes are life and death. The dissolver, invoked as insult, image perverted as phallic annihilation. “Ugra,” meaning fierce or severe, the evil work supplanting spiritual duty - liberation shunned for profane materialism; immolation carried forth with self-satisfaction. The blazing glory of One, what Oppenheimer saw as he gazed out at the second sun blooming on the horizon. Iron fist rule, the age of decadence and the law of SS. Six hundred and sixty-six encrusted on the mouths of all shepherds and holy men.
The Gita speaks of the divine nature as renunciation, gentleness, purity and non-violence. Antithesis: “Impaled Nazarene supports nuclear energy and the destruction of the environment.”
Brothers Mika and Kimmo Luttinen ride the painfuk machine to empty; the former’s dead-alive croaks powering atomic punk anthems detonated at the intersection of technology and spiritual nihilism. A new religion of exploitation, perpetuating hate as it perpetrates the crude exchange of lover with slave, sex seen as gross experiment, man and woman reduced to guinea pigs before the open mouth of the beast. Its savagery is boundless, its maturity non-existent. The word “fuck” is used almost a dozen times. The word “cunt” turns up as a close second. One verse is simply titled “Vagina.”
The desiccate, cold-blooded and totalitarian simplicity of
Ugra Karma does not hinder the volume of excess and corruption displayed lyrically, but actualizes the deviant urges of the Finns’ lizard brain. A collision of cyberpunk and hardcore punk, steadied by semi-majestic keyboards burning in an afterglow of fallout and cigarette tips. The game of domination and control kick-started at the onset by the opening grind blasts “Goatzied,” falling next into the emerging death grunts and stiff melody of “The Horny and The Horned,” which touches briefly on native folk ditties before being snuffed out by three-chord progressions of slowly churning thrash tunes and inane twenty-second anti-songs.
In fits of self-harm not duplicated until Antaeus bared their scar-hardened flesh to the world, Mika mutilates himself from the inside out, his tongue fallen back, face pouting red and choking as caustic bile wells up from the throat. Black vomit eruptions that overpower the dual hum of guitarists Antilla and Jarva’s locust strings and reach orgasmic command in the heart of “Cyberchrist’s” sworn promise to “BURN / YOU BURN.” Promises kept. Simply put, you could fuel a bomber on what the son of a bitch is gargling. Goat piss turned into gasoline, pointed south and hosed into open orifices hammered sore by Kimmo’s channeling of the godhead as cudgel-fisted punisher. No end to the violation as big brother returns to keep “fucking the anal of your god.”
The idol is defiled but unperturbed. And in some perverse way, extolled through these reflections of man’s time at an end. Shiva, manifestation of time, is still dancing today.
[Todd DePalma]
Impaled Nazarene
Ugra Karma
1993
Osmose Productions
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