By Dominick Fernow, owner.

Inquisition, Nefarious Dismal Orations
Inquisition are a two-piece with roots in Colombia as a thrash band in the late ’80s/early ’90s, then they relocated to the US and started playing black metal. This is totally devastating fast-paced and pummeling, but it’s not war metal. The guitars are very shrill, with a lot of open chords ringing out and the drums are just total machine-gun drumming. It creates this obliterating, trancelike atmosphere. The vocals are extremely strange and people either love them or hate them. It’s somewhere between a scream and a growl, and it almost sounds like liquid being squeezed out of the body. It’s very odd and ominous and inhuman. Their mix of simplistic, descending melody and fierce, raw aggression makes this sinister but somehow affirming atmosphere. And the art is great—they have an old-school metal art style. They’re deeply involved in Satanism, and they’re one of the few bands that manages to portray that image in a unique way while holding on to the tradition.

Akitsa, Sang Nordique
This is almost like underwater black metal. It’s simple and there’s a great young, almost punk atmosphere to it—just grime and grit and gravel. It’s like what you want a punk band to sound like but they rarely do. Their vocals are some of the most aggressive screeching and desperate wailing, but almost in an anthemic way, like old oi! vocals.

Circle of Ouroboros, Shores
This is an interesting case because I think a lot of people would argue that this isn’t even a black metal record. A lot of the time, the “black” part of black metal is more in reference to the ideology and motivation and lifestyle behind the music and not only the sounds. There’s a surface conception that black metal only sounds like Darkthrone or Burzum; actually, it’s hugely diverse in terms of the sounds, but what really defines it is the ideology. This record almost sounds like a British post-punk band, and in fact they do a Joy Division cover (“She’s Lost Control”). It’s a midpaced, depressive, downtrodden sound somewhere between necro and post-punk. The more I discuss black metal with those involved, the more Joy Division fans I meet.

Lifelover, Pulver
A masterpiece of perversion. It’s a group with members of other Swedish black metal icons, but it’s a mix of metal, post-punk, clean and sorrowful guitars, and again a really heavy Joy Division feel. It still has a kind of folk sensibility to some of the music, at times drifting into a deranged carnival atmosphere. The subject matter ranges from drugs to sexual fetishes to insanity. It’s extremely potent; it doesn’t give you answers, it raises a lot of questions.

Air Conditioning, Dead Rails
A lot of people who come in and ask me for black metal are specifically looking for extremely noisy, rough, raw, obfuscated, dense music played on rock instruments. That’s why I include this, not because it’s black metal but I think there’s a link there in terms of its sound and it being abstract, trancelike, monolithic…just destroyed-sounding.

Hospital Productions is the place for obscure black metal and noise in New York City, and it’s as underground as it gets since you actually have to climb down a ladder into the basement of a reggae record store to get to it. But there’s no kvlter-than-thou bullshit here—Fernow, aka power electronics act Prurient, is more than happy to discuss and recommend if you ask.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Staff Picks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.