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Archived Reviews
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After the excellent Inri I was really looking forward to hearing what Nero & Josef Heresy came up with next. This newie sees them being joined by Rotny on guitar & synths & drummer Filip Abby which, in places, gives the album a more rock-flavoured industrial feel, most noticeably on the awesomely superb "Scar Of The Deceiver", an ultra-bombastic, almost punky track which is so massive in scope & so overwhelmingly powerful that it's almost beyond human comprehension. Leaving aside the short intro, "Parasitic", similarly, gets the album off to a banging start, being as dark & as powerful as you could wish for with a sound that sets the band apart from just about all of their contemporaries. The one problem is that, once it's established, it's as if they then try their best to undo all that good work by repeating themselves a little too often for comfort, with the same sounds, what's more! The aforementioned "Parasitic" & "Anaesthetic (For The Pathetic)" are virtually dead ringers for each other while "Flesh Harvest" doesn't exactly stretch things that much, either & while this could have been a major problem in lesser hands it's importance is dramatically reduced by the fact that each track is enthralling enough to leave its mark in a big way, the dark, menacing melodics being a consistent 'grabber' &, really, the effect that they have on "Anaesthetic...." & later, during the almost overwhelmingly dramatic "VIsceral Holocaust", which almost has to be heard to be believed, cannot be overestimated. Indeed, the album becomes ever more dramatic & powerful the further it progresses, culminating in "The Purging", which is little short of a masterpiece in the way that it takes the power & the sonic agony to new heights of darkly bombastic grandeur, strong enough to fry your brain (in the best possible way, of course!) & proving that Nero & his cohorts are beginning to pull away from the dark electro hoi polloi & moving into new, ever more powerful realms with a level of expertise that marks them out as leaders in their field, God only knows what they'll come up with next! |
