ORTHODOX DIVINITY : THY DEITY
Unsigned
“Fuck God, and fuck his believers”. That’s the message of this recording, and if it doesn’t sink in the first time you hear it, solo artist Regurgitator is more than happy to etch it into your skull with searing waves of the most primitive, filthy black metal yet to grace these pages. “Thy Deity” is the debut demo from this act, a stab to the vitals with a rusty blade, over so quickly you don’t realise what’s passed until your life’s bleeding away into the gutter. For all its brevity, however, there’s no doubting the intent and motivation of this seethingly furious artist.
Opener “Orthodox Divinity” begins with monkish chanting, but it’s a fool who doesn’t expect the tumultuous roar of dirty riffs that break the calm and tear up any atmosphere of meditation. The guitar work on this demo is primal yet gutsy, engaging the baser part of the listener’s brain and initiating a devastating momentum. The vocals, for the most part, are a curious mixture of whisper and rasp, highly effective in establishing the aura of evil, and extremely fitting to the overall approach. The percussion, such as it is, occasionally seems to go off and do its own thing, like a recalcitrant band member who had other ideas (a bizarre notion in a solo act). And it doesn’t really matter; the output here is so decidedly, consciously lo-fi that chaos works, and polished, abyssal gravity blasts would have totally spoiled the necro finish.
Indeed, with Orthodox Divinity one doesn’t wonder, as is often the case with many of these projects, what Regurgitator could have achieved with equipment and a studio. The listener’s attention is instead wholly focused on the extent to which he’s realised a unique potential without having to bother with such matters. “Black Goat”, despite being recorded in one channel, has a grim and crusty urgency, whilst “Witching Hour” displays the kind of structural insanity I most like to see in raw black metal, crashing in and out of existence before collapsing in an exhausted heap of feedback. They’re both perfect just the way they are.
With releases such as this, I come to realise how privileged and precarious the role of the reviewer is; primitive black metal just happens to be my particular bag, and the more batshit insane the better. To a whole swathe of the so-called ‘metal community’, this is going to be an unlistenable mess, but to those who share my filthy predilections… hearing stuff like this is why we get out of bed in the morning. Like black metal’s founding fathers on crystal meth, this is teeth-gnashingly, pope-stabbingly mental, and just about as grim as they come. I hope Regurgitator’s progression through the darkest corridors of hell never gets any tidier.
79/100
ELLEN SIMPSON
