THE AUSTRASIAN GOAT (s/t) CD
I'm very picky in the case of Black Metal, especially when it's only a one-man band, because most of what I've heard was just boring. Only a very few did raise my interest, but in general I'm not a huge fan of all this new one-man units, especially when it's a Metal group. Something is always missing.... But I don't miss anything while listening to the album of THE AUSTRASIAN GHOST that has been released in 2007 from I Hate Records. The person behind the mysterious moniker THE AUSTRASIAN GHOST is former ShallNotKill guitarist/vocalist Julien Louvet, who's also doing the small underground label 213 Records. After two split cd-r's, this is the first full-length which is limited to 500 copies. Julien Louvet combines Black Metal with Industrial Drones, and then he plays that misanthropic powerful blend in the slowest possible pace. The result is super-heavy and drenched in pure bleakness. Every song is like a giant monument which enfolds its majesty and darkness with every pounding beat.
But he also incoporated a few instrumental cuts, which are very different to the rest of the here included nine songs and making the album more varied. 'Silence is weapon' is a good example for the influence of rhytmic industrial and drones, while 'Black is not a Colour' is just an overwhelming piece of anger and rage. The fifth song is a cover of Grief's 'I hate the human race', and after Julien Louvet's treatement, the song fits perfectly to the rest of the album, especially because you can't make a Grief song much bleaker than it already is. It's more that the version of THE AUSTRASIAN GOAT is just more monumental, without mutilating the structure of the original song. Once again, I Hate Records released a masterpiece of pure intensity and listening to this cd is like watching an epic sinister movie.
(KK)