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ARAGON
Antichrist EP

Werewolf Promotion (2014)
Rating: 5/10

Clearly drugged up on those old Bathory and Beherit albums, Poland’s old school black metallers Aragon follow on from 2012’s Torn By The Devil racket with this unholy batch of tracks. Responsible for those god-awful barks and belches of blasphemy, Daren is joined by Slav, who clatters along with the bass and guitars. The result is a rather messy stab at underground evil that will certainly appeal to those with one foot in the black metal inner circle and another in Satan’s candle-lit inverted pentagram.

This four-song cassette EP opens with the title track, a horrendous din of a song featuring remote and evil-sounding rasps, and a drum sound first heard on that first self-titled Bathory album all those years ago (1984). Noise to some, but to others ‘Antichrist’ is a perfect blend of crusty basement metal that goes beyond the usual cold extremes of black metal.

Although the vocals are unintelligible, I can only guess that such rants are aimed at the church, such is the hell-bent fury. It’s just a shame the production is poor, although this was probably intentional on the part of the duo. Even so, the guitars make for a rather unhealthy cacophony as the bass rumbles with no real effect, the whole thing playing out like an expression of hellish obscurity before the strains of ‘Souls Condemnation’ come billowing out of the speakers amid plumes of black smoke and burning flesh. It’s a fast track with distant vocal rasps, hyper drums, and the sort of lo-fi guitar sound which reeks of the obscure but also the downgraded.

Interestingly, the four songs on this EP are quite long – too long in fact, with ‘Separate This World’ clocking in at over six minutes. Again, the track has a “live from the cellar of doom” feel to it with the down-tuned distant guitars and vocals, which reverberate off the dank walls amid the messy barrage of drums. Aragon are clearly impure souls only interested in creating raw, primitive music for those with a fetish for such horror.

An impure guttural tumult seemingly bereft of professionalism or tune, the closing ‘Suicide For All’ runs for a negative seven-or-so minutes. The drums continuously rattle away like a pneumatic drill, occasionally giving way to the migraine-inducing vocal vomits and dissonant guitar.

It’s hard to decide whether this is a truly unholy clamour or merely an uproar that deserves little or no attention, but whatever your opinion, Aragon have a sound that appears as though it’s been around longer than when hell’s caves were carved out. It’ll take a brave man to ignore a din so brain-numbing, and I’m sure that if Lucifer did want to create a bitchin’ band then the members of Aragon might be selected as his backing band.

Neil Arnold

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