NORTT/XASTHUR
split
Southern Lord
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Southern Lord is the go-to label for the Superdoom scene, the slowed-to-a-crawl narco Sabbath rock favored by ex-and-future members of the Melvins and Pentragram, but lately they’ve been adding hopelessly obscure, utterly over-the-top black metal bands to their roster. These aren’t flash-black million dollar demons like Cradle of Filth, mind you, they’re mostly one-man bands in corpse-paint  that haven’t left their bedrooms for months, cranking out singularly despairing wails of anguish laced with angry teenage noise and church bells. The kinda guys that might otherwise be torching churches, or at least the family pets, without these musical distractions. In a way, this cult necro-black metal is the ultimate in “Outsider” music, because many of it’s creators are so isolationist that they never play live, or even meet their collaborators. So, as you might expect, the music they make is pretty fucked.

This is a split CD with two such misanthropic entities. Xasthur is a guy from Southern California named “Malefic” who makes swirling dustclouds of discordant doom riffs that stretch out for ten minutes at a time and then land in a bloodless heap. He says it’s a “horrifying aura of blackness”, but it sounds more like a static-y TV randomly switching stations between old black and white horror flicks and  Italian funeral processions. Don’t get me wrong, it’s no fuckin’ picnic, but it’s more interesting and weirdly compelling than horrifying. The other cat, Nortt, is a ‘funeral-doom’ champ from Denmark. He once released a CD that retailed for $37, but that’s another story. Here he offers up four overwrought odes to stilled hearts filled with solitary piano plinkings, slowly churning sub-Sabbath riffs, and a raspy dead-man’s howl. The songs are still a little too rock n’ roll to be the hopelessly depressing wrist-slashers Mr. Nortt would like them to be, but they’re still impressively bleak, evil things.

Obviously, this is of interest mostly to hardcore doom/black metal aficionados, but freakwatchers and outsider music hunters will also find this release perversely enthralling. It’s the sound of rock n’ roll recoiling in disgust. ________________________________________________________

-Sleazegrinder