First up, let’s get one thing out of the way. I don’t necessarily agree with the politics of a band such as these, but good music is good music regardless of the beliefs of the people behind them and we all have the right to an opinion. We covered Burzum before now – because even though Varg is a bit of a twit to put it lightly he does make good music. Then there are the fools out there for whom the music is little more than a platform for spreading their message of hatred and intolerance borne more often than not out of sheer ignorance (usually these are fairly easy to spot as they dot their I’s with swastikas and have album titles like Fascists Unite with every song being about white supremacy). Bottom line is if you have something to rant about then start a blog or whatever…I know it’s difficult when you can barely string a full sentence together more complex than “Poles are nicking all the fucking jobs innit” but that doesn’t mean you have to inflict your shoddy 2-bit basement black metal on me!
Radicale Randgruppe is truly an album that captures my full attention right from the start, and one that is best experienced in a darkened room allowing you to fully soak up the terrifying ambience. ‘Me Ne Frego’ really prowls in with an air of menace, the vocals are a synthesized authoritative yell surrounded by all kinds of strange and unsettling sounds which ricochet about in the mix as the scorching guitars leave their mark and a militant, merciless industrialised rhythm keeps a continuous marching pace, 2, 3, 4. There’s a really hollow vibe to this as though beneath the surface lies a bottomless abyss where things just rattle around endlessly. The rattling machine gun fire of ‘Triarii’ plays against screeching synths and a sea of hissing and fuzziness creating a right old cacophony of sound. There’s a juxtaposition here of the orderliness of militant marching which relentlessly comes at you striking down all in its path and the chaos that surrounds it; scenes of death and destruction, bullets flying and fires raging and it’s sinister as hell.
‘White Earth’ slows down to a more relaxed middling pace which has a trippy vibe to it especially as the white noise builds up and attempts to climb over it all. ‘Oath Of Blood’ is an interesting shift as a doom-heavy piano ploughs through over a callous, bitingly cold wind that you can picture swiping its way through a bleak and desolate landscape in the black of night; it whistles through the speakers and really sends a chill into the room while the piano gives a strange sense of classical mourning over the top. Through later tracks things remain equally disquieting and at one point things genuinely feel as though someone is going to step out of the computer and start shooting at me with a machine gun. The piano tinkling on ‘The Golden Age’ adds a melancholic overtone to the underlying madness which still won’t let up. ‘The Empire’, at 15 minutes in length, does drag things on just a bit too long to the finish and really lets things down for me because apart from that this is an excellent album of industrial black metal that reminds me of Spektr in terms of its atmosphere, and had it been received sooner would without a doubt have been in my top albums of 2010.
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