Kev Rowland No-one can accuse either the band or the label of being under-stated here. The band name means “the fetish of the undeterred impetus” and there is then a couple of complex paragraphs explaining what that actually means while the album itself is described as “The obliteration is a principle which sets down the exploitation of external material for every organism. The principle is preserved by the permanent production of biomass. The usage of achievements of destruction becomes the base of all life. Every organism is thrown and obtained through the tunnel of decomposition. This comprehension of the obliteration became the initial point for the musical and lyrical abstractions.” Yes, it is quite safe to say that there is nothing ‘normal’ going on here.

That is definitely the case with this 5 song Black Metal album which has as much in common with Art Zoyd as it does with Darkthrone. In some ways this is ‘noise’, in others ‘industrial’ (in the Throbbing Gristle as opposed Rammstein sense), but always complex and never compromising on any level. 64 minutes of music that keeps hitting the listener like a battering ram, daring them to turn it off and return to the sanity of anything else. But while on many levels it is almost anti-music, on other levels it contains some of the most interesting stuff I have ever heard. Certainly you need to be in the right mindset to actually be able to listen to this at all, and very few will view this as music at all. But if you want something that is so extreme that it attempts to defy what we normally perceive as music, then this should be interesting. But, it does come with the health warning that most people will just view this as noise and a waste of electricity. Thankfully I’m not one of them. www.templeoftorturous.com