Friday, July 27, 2018

Hate Forest - Purity (2003)


Related:
Astrofaes - Those Whose Past Is Immortal (2006)
Kladovest - Escape in Melancholy (2009)
Rattenfänger - Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum (2012)
Blood of Kingu - Dark Star on the Right Horn of the Crescent Moon (2014)

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the 666th black metal album to be posted on OPIUM HUM. I had planned to mark the occasion with a list of my top 100 (or 50 or something) favorite black metal records, but I'm still hemming and hawing about the order, and haven't even started working on the writeups. Oops, I guess that the guy who is constantly getting high and writing about music that no one cares about has a procrastination problem. Who knew?

So in the meantime, here's a (spoiler alert) shoe-in for my top 10: the cold, epic perfection of Purity by Hate Forest. Icy guitars, bestial vocals, simple but unrelenting drumming, and a lone synth drone tying each song to the next. An absolute game-changer for me -- should be one of the first black metal records anyone hears.

EDIT: As an anon pointed out, Hate Forest are/were notorious racists/possible nazis. Should have warned you about that, my bad.

Track listing:
1. Domination
2. Elder Race
3. The Gates
4. Megaliths
5. The Immortal Ones
6. Desert of Ice
7. Cromlech

What the ruins remember

More top 10 material:
Abigor -
Verwüstung / Invoke The Dark Age (1994)
Svartsyn -
... His Majesty (2000)

6 comments:

  1. yeah, and one of the most listened nsbm bands.

    "true aryan black metal"
    "Every subhuman buying HATE FOREST releases buys a weapon against himself."

    like their other projects Kingu and others i forgot.

    they spread their words and propaganda thru music and now this blog is a part of that.



    sometimes antisocial, always antifascist!

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    Replies
    1. This is all true, I should have put a NS warning as I always do when I post sketchy black metal, gonna go do that now. Those quotes are indefensible -- I hadn't heard the "true aryan" one, haven't been able to track down the source for it yet. Really dumb. However, my policy on NSBM remains: as long as you hide your dumb beliefs well enough that I could theoretically download your album and listen to it without having any idea, I'm in. There's too much actual racist violence in this world for me to care about some shit that dudes put on their website back in the day -- for the record, to my knowledge, none of their other projects rep NS. That's not to say that you shouldn't care, that's just where I'm at.

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    2. Blood of Kingu doesn't even deal with NS topics. Being a band with Thurios and Saenko doesn't make it automatically a NS band.

      Delete
  2. I thought this was a stepped-on rip when I first listened, with the thin bass and all, but then learned that they record lo-fi.
    About the National Socialist stuff, am I supposed to care about what is being incoherently growled? Just the growling sound is enough for me.

    ReplyDelete