Thursday 10 May 2007

Coffins - The Other Side of Blasphemy



http://www.divshare.com/download/607701-64c

Review from Decibel Magazine

The cover of Coffins' last album, Mortuary in Darkness, depicts a naked lady on her back in a cemetery, one of her legs held up by a bone-winged demon who's gnawing on her severed arm. Another demon lurks in the background with a bloody machete in one hand and a spine (with the skull still attached) in the other. Plus a few inverted crosses. The cover of The Other Side of Blasphemy has another unclothed woman spread-eagled in front of a demon. On this one, she's nailed to the ground with crosses and our guy is holding the demon baby he has obviously just ripped out of her womb. Oh, and there's a burning church in the background. This demon is bigger and clearly higher-ranked in the demon hierarchy than the Mortuary guys. In D&D, Blasphemy Demon could once per day summon 5-8 (1d4+4) of the Mortuary Demons; in a video game, he'd be a middle-of-the-game boss, and eventually you'd just kill the smaller ones for power-ups.

As a man with word count limitations, I'm happy to report that the albums are pretty much the same deal: The Other Side of Blasphemy is a meaner, more damaging big brother to Coffins' previous records. A t-shirt scan pulls up Hellhammer, Corrupted, and Grave, and the Tokyo trio nails the good parts of all of them. The tempos rarely rise above a crawl, except for the Frosty gallop in the first half of "Evil Infection," with "Destiny to Suffering" wallowing in the deepest sludge for seven-and-a-half minutes. It's still less muddy than Mortuary, and the slightly brighter recording gives Blasphemy an occult flamejob assisted by the increased presence of lead guitar. Which makes the melodic and triumphant (but still doomy as hell) instrumental "Rise" a surprising closer. I like to assume that it's the demon who was triumphant, and that he's flying the demon baby off to his even bigger master, where he'll be trained in demonic arts involving naked ladies and the saga will continue. —Anthony Bartkewicz

1 comment:

JG said...

I love the fact that there's absolutely no punk or hardcore on this blog so far.

keep it that way.