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ALBUM REVIEW
- Infernal Stronghold - Godless Noise
- Forcefield Records
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- Dirty, dirty, DIRTY and cool.
That’s how I’d describe "Godless Noise" in four words. Of
course, it’s never been Infernal Stronghold’s ambition to be ‘cool’,
and I wouldn’t like to tar them with that brush – regular readers should know
that cool in my books is a perverse, nasty, hateful, puking thing. I’m not sure that
there’s ever been a more suitably-titled album; a sheer onslaught of raucous, feral,
blackened cacophony, channelling punk as much as anything else but never sounding anything
but extreme, this second full-length is enough to make you despair entirely at the
uselessness of civilisation.
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- Opener "Curb the Trend"
was very well chosen, because it totally upsets the listener’s expectations. Part
messy, thrashy death, part grinding, mental aggression, it’s impossible to tell from
this initial cut how the rest of the album will pan out. All that you know is that
it’s filthy, lethal, and in some horrible way, infectious. Later tracks, such as "Crippling
Blasphemous Persistence", reveals more of the band’s blackened core, with a
rather frostbitten lead, whilst "Taghut" has a distorted, slow little
break that is pure Darkthrone. There’s no derivation here, though; it’s more
like the manic slaughter of music you might know rather than the reproduction of those
self-same tunes.
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- Although Infernal Stronghold’s
US heritage is obvious – the D.I.Y punk, the thrashy riffing, the, as they put it,
‘goats and blunts’ attitude – the way they’ve taken black metal’s
nastiness to heart actually makes them seem like close cousins to the Australian scene.
The combination of unadulterated racket and wicked catchiness evokes Sadistik Exekution or
Destroyer 666, the fine line well-trod between mess and purposeful chaos, the blasphemy,
the undeniable anger and aggression and the lack of respect for, well, anything,
linking them to their unlikely brethren across the ocean.
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- "Godless Noise" made
my week – that there are a bunch of bastards out there with the insanity to produce,
in a calculated manner, such a gloriously horrible racket is a fine thing. Circumventing
convention – whilst spitting on it and calling it names – has brought Infernal
Stronghold way closer to the true spirit of both black metal and punk than the majority of
their navel-gazing, corpse-painted, forest-exploring fellow countrymen could hope to come.
This is the perfect antidote to life.
- 90/100
- Ellen Simpson
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- www.myspace.com/infernalstronghold
- www.infernalstronghold.com
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