Bahimiron

Southern Nihilizm
Moribund Records

Jesus fuck Texas, what kind of reprobates are you letting run loose? I'd just gotten done absorbing the gooey vileness of Brown Jenkins' newest album - and then I get hit with this! It's a fucking shambles, a wreck that goes from thrilling to absurd at the drop of a a very evil hat.

Every stringed instrument is distorted and downtuned to the point of a serrated edge, the vocals are a tangle of subhuman agony - high shrieks, low roars, gasps - the guitar solos are rusted and accidental, the drums are just schizo arhythms. "Southern Nihilism" is an album that takes the manic inexorable charges of AngelCorpse but beats the shit out of the precision with baseball bats and broken bottles - ending up with a bruised atonal thrash-and-writhe - akin to labelmates Hacavitz, Avsky, a messier Carpathian Forest, and old Nuclear Death. There're some very American noise and sickpunk influences rearing their head too (check out the Crimson Ghost tattoo one member sports).

That said, listening to "Southern Nihilism," I'm amazed that somehow Bahimiron have managed to get a reverb switch to go up to 80,000 and that the drummer sounds like he's in time with the rest of the band maybe twice a song. In fact, more often than not it sounds like each band member is trying to draw-and-quarter the song away from his/her colleagues. But this is the sort of foot-on-the-gas, ribcage-impaled-by the gear shift madness that separates out good black metal from just mere pseudo-orc posturing. To wit, the album sounds like a warped tape of an exorcism playing in a metal drum full of rocks and scorpions, rolling down a very steep hill. No pause for reflection or perfection. Pure adrenaline and what-the fwooshing by so quickly that you can't comprehend the awesomeness/awfulness of their hyperspeed gutcheck, a million directions at once, roar of pillaging antisocial metallics. Almost avant-garde by accident.

- Matthew Moyer