Antaeus
Cut Your Flesh And Worship Satan

The extreme limit of anguish has been reached.

A new, brutal experimentation of torment takes shape from the depressive experience, which, emptied of its melancholic and decadent component, finally reveals the devastating self-destructive rage that pervades it. The pain loses its philosophical and emotional meaning to become only the last, cruel physical sensation appreciable. The last remaining contact with the sensible world passes through the blade of a razor, too sharp to evade suffering, too little to put an end to it. The wounds that cut the skin like purple flowers hold in their gangrenous cavity the last vestiges of life... a life held only by the torture of the flesh, and that without it, would fade away or drain with the blood.

This is the content of the manifesto of Antaeus “Cut Your Flesh And Worship Satan”; this the meaning of a very unique Raw Black Metal whose fury does not have, and will not have for a long time, equals in the entire world scene; this the message that resides in the complicated, dense hieroglyph of "stigmates" that cover the arms of the singer MkM. Even if forced to juggle between session members and drum machines, failing labels, and demos swallowed by the unfathomable French underground, the two founding members of the project (Set and MkM) have succeeded in best expressing the lucid madness of this full-length, which manifests itself through inhuman grind-brutal timings, of American school, which merge with a monstrous, gloomy black riffing, an aberrant sublimation of self-destructive nightmares.

The perfect production, cruelly clear, doesn't spare the listener a single, devastating double bass stroke or a searing guitar note. The crushing blastbeat that rages throughout the album is appreciable in every measure, as well as the spasms of the bass. The vocalist's frightening technique allows variations from feverish scream tones to abyssal growls, which, even if brief, have nothing to envy from the performances of more experienced colleagues in death formations. It's perceivable, during the entire duration of fifty and a half minutes of the album, a halo of madness, a psychiatric hospital atmosphere, of which the short but unsettling preludes, characteristic of almost all songs, are mainly responsible, and an integral part. In them, the sonic massacre that follows is hinted at, in dreamlike tints.

This is the case of the opener “Inner War”, introduced by a fluid silence, disturbed by harsh laments, in which the despair of a sick mind enclosed within itself is clearly and unbearably felt. The composition of the piece slightly deviates from the structure adopted for the other tracks, but it is not, for this reason, to be considered of lesser value. It is instead one of the salient points of this “Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan”, which, while always remaining within the limits of Black Metal, owes more to the brutal-death structures that so influence Set's guitar. The voice itself is affected by these contaminations, mixing scream and growl in passages with "deicidal" flavor.
If the atmosphere is the same for “Specimen 23”, it is also true that this piece is much more closely linked to the concept of BM, which remains, however, very personal, being Antaeus. An intro characterized by a background of what seems to be electromagnetic interferences sees the repetition of an incomprehensible phrase, pronounced by an inhuman, robotic, and beastly voice. As this fades, the grinding of the drums intervenes, which immediately turns into a devastating double bass carpet, which however finds the opportunity to slow down on the insertions of a very rotten bass. MkM's tone becomes drier, higher, and more troubled, reverberated by the murky and powerful work of the guitar, whose riffs alternate in strange sequences.

The only other piece that slightly withdraws from brutality to give to evocativeness is “Bleeding Blasphemy”, whose arrangements touch something akin to melody, which would not have been believed possible on a record like this. The group's battle standards remain, however, songs like “Seventh Ceremony” and “Devotee”, whose violence rises a notch higher than the productions of any black group. But the unappealable confirmation of what has just been said comes with ruinous fury in “Those With No Eyes”. A single, distressing syllable, filtered through monstrous therapeutic machines, preludes the unfolding of this masterpiece. A syllable that in its funereal sound contains an unspeakable alloy of anger and suffering. A syllable that explodes into a terrifying, prolonged, and lacerating imperative: “Kill!”. The drums that insert are a storm, an unheard-of wind of horrors that annihilates the listener. The guitar becomes a scourge that opens unhealable wounds, whose notes are as sharp as razors. MkM roars his fury, dominating the whole, tyrant over a kingdom in the grip of Chaos.

This is the sublimation of “Cut Your Flesh And Worship Satan”: the denial of life. Not a moment of respite, no possibility of a breath in this vortex of self-inflicted wounds. “I have nothing left to mutilate”