Slashing Death - Irrevocably and With No Hope (1989)

Vintage Polish savagery from this pre-Vader unit. Although ostensibly a black/thrash record, this is so raw and chaotic that the faster moments sound like 7 Minutes of Nausea on a metal tip. Plenty of splashing cymbals, manic guitar abuse and guttural vocals make for a thrilling listen. Parts of this bear comparison to Blasphemy and their progeny, but with a near-psychedelic looseness few war metal bands achieve. Some of it even made me think of Peter Brotzmann, for no good reason. The token "ambient" intro with Santana guitar and machine gun fire is a vintage treat, too.

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Semen of Satan/Evoked Doom

Uploaded this for Chris of Tenhornedbeast and his related blog, after a discussion of inept German metal (POISON). Semen of Satan are a band of legendary stature to me and about 6 other people, and it took me ages to even find mp3s of the demo.

I was expecting some inept, barely-audible proto-proto-black metal, so I was surprised at the amount of sheer ability on offer here. After a charmingly cheesy intro, we get a violent slab of proto-death doom crawl, which soon erupts into soloing that reminds me of vintage Pentagram. Listen through the tape hiss and you realise that this is actually an accomplished METAL band, rather than the quasi-noise I was expecting.

Semen of Satan later devolved into Evoked Doom, who are a lot closer to the sludgy hell I always search for. I'm pretty sure they use a drum machine, and seem a lot more chaotically-minded than Semen of Satan. Still, there's some great guitarwork buried in the slime, and the vocals are insane. If anyone can shed any further light on the history and circumstances of these bands, or has any recommendations for other 80s obscurities, let me know.

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