Blut aus Nord
The Work Which Transforms God

"The Work which Transforms God", the work that transforms God. Not only God, but also the conception we have of "music". This work by the Blut aus Nord, renowned blacksters (although, in my opinion, this definition is somewhat limiting for what they propose) from the extremely prolific and interesting French Black Metal scene (does the name Deathspell Omega ring a bell?), is a mass of sounds, rhythms, and ideas that seem totally disconnected, an album where absolute heterogeneity rules: there are tracks that evoke Doom Metal (Metamorphosis), others that harken back to the hardest and rawest Black, others Ambient (an example is the intro "End"), and still others with strong Depressive Black shades ("Axis", although there are more properly Black moments present).

I consider it pointless to dwell on the technical aspects of the album because "The Work which Transforms God" does not live on technique, but rather on atmospheres, sensations, emotions, and the chills and anxiety it manages to evoke. I said, a little earlier, that the ideas present in this album "seem" totally disconnected. I used that verb because, in my view, what the French have wanted to do is a process of what we might call "deconstruction of the song-form", an experiment also attempted at other times and by other musicians (the first example that comes to mind, the most recent, is "A Umbra Omega" by the Norwegians Dødheimsgard (of which I also wrote a review here on Debaser, if you are interested). The difference between "The Work which Transforms God" and "A Umbra Omega" is that this deconstruction, in the case of the Norwegians, occurs within the individual songs, maintaining, however, a structural coherence within the entire album; the Blut aus Nord, on the other hand, strip the whole album of a structure, making it an incoherent and disjointed amalgam (as I have seen it defined in many reviews I have read, which have only lingered on the surface of this work, in my opinion) only on the surface, because in reality it is coherently incoherent (forgive me, but I love oxymorons). And, in my view, this becomes evident from the opening track, called "End", a title that invites one to look, or rather, listen to the album from a different perspective than usual: here you don't start from the beginning but from the end.

Obviously, this is just my humble opinion, which could be as wrong and baseless as it has a grain of truth: only the Blut aus Nord can say this. In conclusion, I can only invite you, if you haven't already done so, to listen to this which is a true gem of extreme music not only from France but worldwide.