Der Blutharsch
Der Blutharsch

No title. No titled track. No introductory note. Just a gray cross on a gray background. On the cross, imprinted in almost illegible characters: Der Blutharsch, literally "harsh blood".

This is how the Viennese Albin Julius introduces his new formidable creation to the music market: Der Blutharsch, indeed.

It was the year 1997. No one had ever dared so much. As with the album cover, the sounds contained in this untitled debut range from light gray to dark gray. Julius is no newcomer, for years he had been around the scene, having already produced something with his The Moon Lay Hidden beneath the Clouds. The debut of Der Blutharsch is therefore something already mature, terribly incisive, destined to become a milestone of the genre.

Julius works by subtraction, he takes the worst of Death in June, Blood Axis, NoN, removes the folk, post-punk, the noise from the warlike suggestions of Pearce, Moynihan, Rice: what remains is a desert of ruins, a landscape of collapsed buildings, a ghost army marching in the dust towards its death.

The post-industrial of Der Blutharsch will have no name, it will simply fall into the cauldron of apocalyptic folk, along with all those artists who, although stylistically dissimilar, are united by ideological creed. It speaks of the right, the extreme right, a romantic and decadent right that artistically rises as an evocation of a glorious and tragic Europe that no longer exists, an evocation of a time when courage, spirit of self-denial, sense of honor moved souls, challenged Death, led to Immortality. Julius, however, still needs to separate Death from Glory, his material is still crudely sliced, only in the future will he be able to marry Beauty and Death, Honor and Blood. For the moment, Julius limits himself to throwing dense strokes of Death into an abstract picture and refining it all with strong accents of harsh epic tension. And in this raw manifestation, Julius's art finds perhaps its best expression: a representation in which war is not only fiercely celebrated, but mostly described in its desolation, in its decay, through the rust of tanks, the mud of trenches, the heaviness of boots dragging in the snow.

Dusty records inherited from the Third Reich, found by Julius in some filthy back shop, sizzle on the plate - perhaps risking jail. Little marches, regime songs, military fanfares drowned in scenarios that evoke immense catastrophes. Julius's representation of war marches slowly, sketched by the wavy and repetitive sound of a deviant electronic, overshadowed by the environmental effluvium of honeyed synths, disturbed by the uncertain gait of slowed orchestras, shaken by the echoing of the generals' raspy cries, marked by the slow and funereal beat of the war drum that measures the desolation of a blood-soaked battlefield scattered with lifeless bodies. These are the true Der Blutharsch: a wall of compact, static, threatening sound, like the long shadows of mighty statues that evoke once-declined empires. Muscles, weapons, and stone nerves about to crumble.

Those who have read my other reviews on this site know how, despite insisting on discussing certain groups, my personal sensitivity and cultural background lead me not to share the message underlying this type of music. I'm not stupid, therefore, I'm not here to deny my deep pacifist convictions. I just wanted to write this review in a sort of Nazi-transference in order to do justice to a work that, for better or worse, has marked the history of a certain type of music.

Art is also described this way; perhaps it's the most honest way to do it.