By Monk
On the title of the opening track of this, the sleaze-infused sludge-encrusted one-man BM machine by the name of Athenor’s sixth full-length album, we are warned to ‘Expect Total Hell’. And, to be brutally honest, that expectation is fully and totally (sic) realized on this equally brutal and cathartic opus disgustus.
Filthy, belligerent and obnoxious are just three adjectives you could use to describe Midnight’s sound. “An ungodly racket” is another descriptive which could easily and summarily applied with accuracy. In both of the previous sentences, I am applying the artist’s own terminology, and it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to disagree with his own assertions. For this is ten tracks of filthy, obnoxious noise, dragged from the sewers encrusted in slime and not even bothering to take a shower before creeping its way out into the back alleys to feed on whatever desperate souls it can find.
This is an album that definitely, and perhaps defiantly, lives up to all of its ‘Hellish Expectations’. It drags us down into the depths of hell and whips our souls with repeated lashes of fiery torment, flaying the remaining skin from our incinerated corpses and feasting on it with gleeful delight, before engorging itself on what remains of our desecrated and desolate souls. One which realizes all the ‘Hellish Expectations’ it predicts and prefaces. Filthily hellish stuff indeed.
- ‘Hellish Expectations’ is out now.
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