Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Dead Reptile Shrine - A Journey Through the Darkest of Forests (2005)


Sure, you're already an expert in Finnish Death Metal by now, but Finnish Black Metal? Not so much. These a Beast kicked it off with the post below mine. I invite you to continue your vision quest with Dead Reptile Shrine. Hammer Smashed Sound turned me on to em a few months ago and their spot in the rotation is pretty secure at the moment.

So yeah Dead Reptile Shrine. The base is sloppy, raw, primitive black metal. The tempos drag and sometimes forget a beat here or there. Suddenly, there is a techno song that makes no apologies for its derivative, lazy nature (Illud Divinum Insanus this is not) even though it's patently bad. Then, you get a riff that sounds like you did when you got your first electric - just a series of fourths (one finger, two strings, same fret) up and down the neck. You get primordial chants, flutes, and ogres lurking in the brume. You get straight-up d-beat bangers. Not infrequently do you wonder whether the haphazard performances are intentional or symptomatic of a talent deficit. This is Black Metal Roky Erickson.

Over at The Left Hand Path, Todd DePalma describes their sound thusly: "The Fernow-esque gold plated cock-in-socket fumbling manufacturing death moans, gulag dances, and clunky faux-percussion, which explodes like rows of compressed air-canisters." Sure, it's not a complete sentence, but it says enough.


Dead Reptile Shrine - A Journey Through the Darkest of Forests

3 comments:

Necrodaemon said...

It's nice focusing on extreme underground acts like DRS. One clarification though is needed. Denis Forkas Kostromitin is not a member of the band. He is a russian artist that among others, has provided artwork for the Dead Reptile Shrine.

DoomUnicorn said...

Details, details. Thanks, dude, I fixed that.

abdul alhazred said...

This is more like The Fugs than Roky Erickson, but I'm liking it.