TEUTOBURG FOREST: ORDO AB CHAO/ANTI-SUBHUMAN SCUM/CULT OF THE INDIVIDUAL
Unsigned
Teutoburg Forest is the work on one Donn, a musician hailing from the north-west of England, who rather impressively taught himself to play guitar and drums after failing to find like-minded co-conspirators with the dedication to pull off his raw and raging vision for the band. These three self-released albums, “Ordo Ab Chao”, “Anti-Subhuman Scum” and “Cult of the Individual”, are the result of one year’s work, and stand testament to a fierce will and focused determination. Stood firmly in the primitive and ugly camp, Teutoburg Forest aims to embody and evoke chaos, elitism and Satanism, using the abrasive and isolationist sound of early 90s Norway to convey pride, hostility and spiteful arrogance.
“Ordo Ab Chao” is the earliest chronologically, and once the creepy and strange metal clanking introduction of “Azerate” is over it serves as a great introduction to Donn’s vocal style, as “The Journey” opens with an enormous, howling screech. This track is typical of Teutoburg’s approach, being mid-paced and cacophonous with deep, distorted vocals high in the mix and very much dominating the listener’s hearing to provide an intense and hateful experience. “Absolute Freedom” is a hellish, subterranean creation, slow-paced and repetitive with endless Arctic howls, whilst “Destroying Cosmos” sees a high-pitched guitar refrain used over the top of roiling, mirey black metal riffing for added weirdness and nausea, with a deep and threatening bass counterbalance resulting in an unsettling final result. Stand-out “Tearing of the Universe” sees some rare clean guitar, introspective and sad, which adds much-needed variation to an otherwise over-similar album.
“Seeing God’s Creation, and Despising It” kicks of proceedings on “Anti-Subhuman Scum” with a typically shrill and raucous assault, involving plenty of bassy obfuscation and lashings of distortion. Discordance is deployed carefully to add to the chaos, whilst deeply buried sweeps of sound in the riffwork hint at something like melody, reminiscent of early Enslaved. This is magnified on “Ain Sof”, which has an excellent malevolent presence, a wicked, basic beat and a broken-down, echoing ending which seems to take pleasure bathing in its own fuzz. “Zero Dimensional Spirits Entering Cosmos” is as primitive as it’s possible to be, with its three chords and brutal distortion, whilst “Delusion of Purpose” is stripped back and percussionless for the most part, again enjoying the pure and freezing sounds of reverberation and clashing distortion before the maelstrom recommences.
The third instalment is “Cult of the Individual”, which starts with a greater sense of atmosphere than its predecessors, all astral, threatening synths and brooding darkness. “Land of my Fathers” brings back the screeching and the discordant riff structures familiar from the other two albums, perhaps exhibiting a wider scope and finer sense of structuring. Indeed, “Cult of the Individual” seems to be the collection with most poise and direction, with tracks such as the atmospheric, dark ambient “As One” providing room to draw breath and grow.
In all, Teutoburg Forest’s black metal is of the raw and rough variety that everyone has heard before, but Donn seems capable of experimenting within the bounds of that genre, as the breakdowns and weird meanderings on some of these tracks prove, and so there is great potential with the development of this artist for some genuinely original sounds to emerge. Until then, adherence to the primitive ways should not preclude quality control; whether it was necessary to release three very similar-sounding albums rather than one collection of the strongest material is questionable, and this also filters down to track level, where some editing would have been desirable. Still, it’s great to see another facet of the UKBM scene, and I’ve no doubt Donn has the relentless and unblinking ferocity to carry this through to higher levels.
68/100
