Blasphemy
Early black metal band illustrates the roots of the genre in blasting grindcore and elucidates the rhythmic transition from hardcore punk music to evil, basic metal.
Fallen Angel of Doom
Wild Rags
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1990
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Production: Poor and beyond but fitting enough to the music; the distortion on drums and guitars peaks a washout during heavy vocal intrusion, but otherwise a mediocre bass-intense production job from a rancid garage is what to expect.
Review: Majestic primal structures colliding create the aura of Blasphemy's music: a soaring, battling, violent spectre of vengeance which would be entirely discountable as too unbelievable if not for its scary lucidity. Riffs are built as phrases here, and the resulting musical advantages let the band make ludicrously simple songs from the basic duality of much of their melodic/harmonic design.
Underneath a metallic and dissipated bass rumble the slamming frequency of riffs come together in linear structures dropped into structural rhythms for integration into a song of different textures conspiring on a theme. Grindcore of the Carcass vein provides the ancestry to these riffs although other black metal and hardcore can be heard clearly in their process.
The intensity of this music comes in the ability of each riff to hold tension through its progress and then work only conclusions in brutal slamming finality, often leaving the tension as an ongoing theme from the opening blast beat to the fading polyrhythmic chaotic rumble of the last guitar track...pieces of simplicity working together coherently as if almost self-assembled by organic process.
Echoing concrete vocals goad the music with violent and incoherent interjections that give explosivity to running beats and otherwise pause and distort sequences of lesser tempo. Pure savagery in performance art makes these as powerful as they are but their seemingly afterthought distribution over rhythm guitar makes them terrifying, dissonant, and incomprehensible in origin. This complements the overall atmosphere of darkness and entropy that flavors this release with power, and gives to its simple patterns a platform to express their nihilistic discompleteness.
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Blasphemy
Gods of War
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1992
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Production: Resounding basement demo production.
Review: Tragic as it is fierce and naturalistically lawless, this album of surging chaos in black metal hymns is crafted from the feral configurations of grindcore riffing and a narrative structural sense of melody that while not harmoniously melodic focuses listener attention on the coherence between a progression of blinding fury in speed riffs culminating in detonations of compiled tensions. Blurring oscillations of power in tremelo architectures connecting pseudopods of harmony in structure reaching from the obscurity of chromatic riffs distorting in collision of percussion and strings on emphasis, the voice of this songwriting style makes lucidity from broken fragments hopelessly flung into randomness and slowly assembling into sense.
Tracklist:
Apocalypse side:
1. Intro: Elders of the Apocalypse / Blood Upon the Alter (2:31)
2. Blasphemous Attack (2:01)
3. Gods of War (0:26)
4. Intro / Atomic Nuclear Desolation (0:42)
5. Nocturnal Slayer (2:22)
Abyss side:
6. Emperor of the Black Abyss (3:20)
7. Intro / Blasphemy (3:42)
8. Intro / Necrosadist (2:42)
9. War Command (0:45)
10. Empty Chalice (1:44)
Blood Upon the Alter Demo (1989)
11. Ross Bay Intro (1:07)
12. War Command (0:41)
13. Demoniac (3:08)
14. Intro to Weltering in Blood (0:35)
15. Weltering in Blood (2:37)
16. Ritual (3:33)
17. Nocturnal Slayer (3:08)
18. Blasphemy (3:55)
19. Intro / Blasphemous Attack / Guitar Effect Outro (2:55)
Length: 41:56
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Copyright © 1992 Osmose
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Lifelike in its organic use of dynamic variation in hook and structure, even within the similar form of blasting grinding hybrid metal which in slamming power chord structures binds rhythm to lyrical voice of guitar tonal progression and from that opens an evolving and developing design of morbidity in encounters with nothingness in dark existential isolation. Gutwrenched expulsions of air and insane howling carry rhythms embedded within song through cryptic and understated counterpoint; instrumentalism while not technical is reasonably precise and effortlessly careless when the noise needs of more obscure compositional detours require reverberant trailing noise in textures of dense complexity.
Although in essence fervently urgent and apocalyptic music, the work of Blasphemy reveals its more complicated underlying emotional and philosophical conception in the emergence of forms contrary to the immediate as fundamental principles of the physics of each song, forming the basics of harmony and melodic continuity through nihilistic atonal riffing. Turbulent umbrage fomenting in the synchronization at resonant intervals of speed of strumming and speed of tonal change ignites the descent into buffeting explosions and a convergence of phenomena to form reverberant fragments of tone creating a background of resonance through which shape of motion through space of note harmony undulates in changing complementary oppositional halves.
When this album emerged within the forefront of black metal legions it forced a recognition of the primitive and elemental in underground music and resurrected within the genre emphasis on epic confrontation in all details of song no matter how simple, varying from the simplistic repetitive structures that prevailed in most other aggressive music. Unbowed to anything, this album demonstrates its concept in theory and practice as fusion in the rendering of this album, a testament to the majesty of primal noise.
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