You couldn’t punch clay uglier than this…
Review by Jason Guest
Release date: 29 May 2015
Stop everything! Put that down, put that back, and stop playing with that. Now! You’d probably have gone blind anyway, playing with it as much as you do. So put your hands where I can see ‘em and pay attention because Iron Bonehead has again found another ugly beauty, this time in the form of a death-drone-sludge collective known as Autokrator. Featuring Loïc.F of industrial black metallers N.K.V.D. (interviewed here) who delivered their second full length Hamarrja in late 2014 (reviewed here) in its five-piece line-up, it’s enough to say that it gets heavy. Very heavy. And violent. Very violent. Eight tracks – each an ‘Act’ in this colossal composition – drag the listener through a chaotic, cacophonous and crushing cavalcade of industrial-strength devastation. From the outset, there is no respite, no room to breathe, and no escape from the album’s ruthless offensive.
Their purpose may once have been considered “musical” but the instruments on this are disfigured, contorted, beaten well out of shape, the sounds that they produce increasingly inhuman and monstrous as the damage unfolds. While the tempos shift between the pulverising and the punishingly slow and the textures become progressively coarser – even during the ambient title track and atmospheric closer ‘Optimus Princeps’ – the album’s motion remains steadfast and the direction undeterred. Dragging, staggering, grinding, the dynamics across the album are mesmerizing, their hypnotic powers enough to overwhelm and, ultimately, consume.
Like the mechanical beasts that at times of war transform mankind into something unfeeling and inhuman that rejoices in its possession of god-like powers, that such power is capable – and attainable – should be frightening but the experience of this is simultaneously chilling and inspiring. Intense throughout, this is the soundtrack to watching the world become nought but dust. This is some seriously ugly shit. I swear you couldn’t punch clay uglier than this.
8 out of 10
Track Listing:
- The Tenth Persecution
- Exsuperator
- The Filthy Pig Of Rome
- Autokrator
- Quails Artifex Pereo
- Sit Divus, Modo Non Vivus
- Imperial Whore
- Optimus Princeps
