Xasthur
Nocturnal Poisoning

THE REVIEW

I had a couple of laughs just now reading a review snatched here and there on the web, about this Xasthur album, dated 2002... The reviewer, while praising the album, criticizes its home-made attitude of piecing together various compositions within each track in a discontinuous and dissonant manner: by doing so, according to him, the linearity and essence of perfection, beyond the typical sonic dirt of this branch of BM, fall short, leaving the listener baffled for not having "fixed" the piece impeccably... MMmm. Damn, strange, I say to myself... Look at the kind of questions people come up with... Completely the opposite of what I think when I listen to this album. For me, a magical combination of discontinuity is the essence of an album like this: the guitars seem like detuned and metallic organs left to decompose, and, aside from Malefic's voice that I surprisingly manage to fully appreciate despite my personal aversion to BM, at times, the arpeggios are absurdly recorded at atomic volumes compared to the cosmic-grinding-harsh drone (if you allow me a hybrid of this kind...), so that it's impossible for anyone not to notice to what levels of inner despair music like this tends.

When I was little, about 10 years old, a guy, the older brother of a childhood friend of mine, handed me "Blood Fire and Death" by Bathory, telling me that if I liked Iron Maiden, then this album was for me... From this, one could deduce that his intent was presumably to deceive a kid smaller than him, squeezing money out of him in exchange for some "heavy metal" rubbish, but nothing foresaw what his proposal would instead engender in my child's head. Handling the album, I gazed at the artwork and the cover in particular... It struck me deeply, much more than the music contained within the album itself; it evoked in my mind what I would dream of later on, and what would torment me even while awake, a hundred times and more throughout my existence, a feeling of omnipotent discomfort while the world around you curls in on itself, while human multitudes, subdued by their existential vertigo, unite, even carnally, in a pogrom of inhumane proportions, without languor, without emotions, without pain... Until the innate bestiality of humans results in nothing but total pacification, like the unreal silence produced by the passage of a tornado. A maelstrom of human bodies, vortexed, mute, and lost among thousands of cries in the night...

With all due respect to poor Quortorn, the musical effect, however, wasn't what the cover described. But it's exactly what I experienced and still experience when listening to this album, more than 25 years later...