About five minutes after I pulled this CD out of the jiffy bag, I was still none the wiser. This was like if black metal was on that popular Lionel Blair TV show of yesteryear Give Us A Clue. I had established that it was black metal as it was mainly black (apart for some reason the inner tray case which was white) and the back of the shiny cover booklet had two sinister corpse-painted figures. Biog nil, band name or album title, nope not even on the CD spine, weird cover and inside pictures with nonsensical writing text, check, this was getting odder. Stamps on envelope Norwegian, logo on back sleeve stated ‘Satanic Propaganda’ and as for the song titles they are penned in a slightly lighter shade of black on black itself. Just about making them out I threw a couple into Google and came up with Dødsengel; result! Stupidly I discovered later if I had simply turned the CD upside down it would have provided me with that one word in small letters on the inner ring, doh!
A bit later I was slightly more illuminated although there is no official webpage and as for a MySpace, ha! Forget it. There is some more mystical Satanic hubbub via a Full Moon Production page and a sparse entry on Metal Archives with no info about band members or anything else much to tell the truth, although this appears to be the group’s debut. So seeped in the underground ethos, there is little more to be said until we come to the music itself.
Intro ‘Åpenbaring’ is a maudlin piano and violin piece, gentle and touching and then the gates are well and truly opened with a hellacious clutter, one that if you had turned the speakers up to try and hear faint words, well they would probably be well and truly blown. ‘Word Of Uncreation’ is violent, skewed, disharmonic, noisy and ultimately vicious as hell. It’s not too pleasant either and goes out of the way to crash and tumble all over the place with little in the way of constructive normalcy. Vocals are abrasive and deranged, screeching and cackling and guitars are shrill and strident, occasionally a bit of mid-paced melody can be heard before everything goes haywire again. This is an hour long trip as well and it has taken me many hours of listening to get into review mode, two listens just today in fact and it is still no easy beast to dissect. ‘Void’ slows down with a doom edge to it and occasional crying sounds coming from the abyss it teeters on. After a couple of minutes it plunges headlong into an angry, fast, flailing miasma of riffing and again strides out hell for leather with a crazed unbalanced feel about the actual songs construction. The one thing I will say in favour of this is that I couldn’t particularly name-check any other band that this reminds me of. This is black metal of the locked up and wearing straightjacket variety!
I am not even sure that it actually works to tell the truth, it doesn’t particularly gel together but then again is it even meant to? Another question that could be asked is do I actually like it and I couldn’t even give a proper answer there either, probably not unless in a really fucked over mood to be honest. There is a sort of structure to the rhythm on numbers such as ‘Warfare By Witchcraft’ but the vocals are completely barking and the song breaks down into a more lunatic fringe rather than keeping anything consistent. Dødsengel have pretty much presented a unique take on orthodox black metal with this perhaps ‘Visionary’ release and it is certainly worth checking out. This is perhaps slightly easier to do now as whilst writing the review I checked again and a MySpace page has suddenly sprung up and even if there is little information and no friends on it I have to wonder if the band have gone and sold out? Fucking fakes!
http://www.myspace.com/dodsengel
