Teitanblood - Seven Chalices
April 13 2009 at 09:31:17 PM
Timo. Fuckin’ Timo Ketola. First impressions are everything. Hold
Seven Chalices in your hands. The title, of course… The Tarot. It speaks to choices – possibilities. It also indicates the propensity for “mystical experience.” Couple this with Timo’s Cthulhuean gorgon, which smokes any semblance of deep motherfucking dread Rob Bottin never fleshed out for
The Thing and the ideas communicated are grave and tangible and fantastic. Amazingly, the music you haven’t yet heard. To the point, it’s definite without being finite, focused while remaining terrifically unfocused, “devotional” without pedantry. Guitars and percussion and vox build effortless, instantaneous scene: Grottoes slicked with blood, scat, semen. Fires lit low, spitting. Leathered and oiled succubae bringing sodomites to climax. And that’s prior to even so much as peeking at the fucking booklet. Timo’s booklet builds the system brick to brick. Skips the mortar altogether. There’s nothing holding anything. Charles Crumb’s graphomania is brandished and increased a billion-fold. Pazuzu, wings akimbo above a serpent nest, a cobra for a cock standing high and hard. Words meaningless and meaningful crawl and scurry and slither about the page. Guitar emulates their ululate yawps, their guttural heaves, their shattering shrieks lachrymose. Drums and cymbals slash and crash – the kit whipped and bludgeoned, broken. Vocals retch and growl and succumb to breathless wrath. It’s too easy to imagine: Unspeakable cruelty, degradation, prejudicial termination. It’s more difficult to imagine three men making this music, crafting it, setting it into place. The sounds here are “primitive,” yes. Their animalistic indifference buttressed by a tenuous and fleeting mysticism, corrals all traditions closely and yet embraces none. There’s an overwhelming alternation of staid ritual and orgiastic purge with every “song” and there’s happily nothing to connect with, nothing to paw into particulars. It’s fucking sick broken chaos. Guitar as bucket to the floor bukkake, drums as if dealt from cloned Mick Harrises – young ones in military surplus and fuzzy adolescent mustaches. But it’s the vox that keeps coming: Bestial, rabid, libidinous… Spanish really is the bona fides linguistic vehicle for blasphemy. Shouted, grunted, puked and spat it reciprocates onomatopoeically. The music stinks because of it. The record itself, weighed down with so much death, holds its end as robustly as a Floridian wharf its humid cuntstench. Don’t separate the music from the booklet. Finger through the pages. Gaze at this shit. They are inseparable. Serpents flaccid and erect, their heads morphed to blood-filled glans and time grizzled totenkopf, cockroaches nesting in their alabaster eye sockets. Eyes and vermin mouths and fissures black and crusted as so many expired spiders, curled and black, sunken into their selves as tiny ashen anuses. Sometimes I can almost imagine these three guys playing this shit. That’s when I’ll peer into the booklet, reading off the words I can’t define, trying to match them up with this pack of dogs begging to be put in the grave, barking, gagging, coughing from the speakers. The motherfucker’s name is goddamn sentence long. Did Timo hole up with this disc? A crate of absinthe. Arms of pens, paper. Draw the shades and just swim in the shit. Words become glyphs; glyphs become runes. Olde English and Spanish and French and Hebrew. Some scratches and indentations that resemble fish bones, the footprints of waterfowl. Over the chanting and the soaring wind and waves the smells come again. You never forget the worst ones. Death stinks. Transubstantiation reeks. It’s a messy process. Blood and shit and piss.
Seven Chalices? No different. It sprints relentless, unforgiving. Always already to its object. And forever beyond it, abominable.
[Stewart Voegtlin]
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Thanks for reading everybody.
I doubt that you take requests, but I'd love your take on these two:
Peste Noire - Ballade cuntre lo Anemi Francor
Ride for Revenge - Wisdom of the Few
Don't care much for that Peste Noire thing. But Finnish Death Metal is A-OK.