Blasphemy — Fallen Angel of Doom....
When playing this album, there’s one word that unfailingly comes to mind: fuuuuck. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to Fallen Angel of Doom and not been blow away by the feverish savagery on display here. The primitive black metal created by these guys is all the more astonishing considering they basically only had Sarcófago, Possessed, Mayhem, and Bathory to go off of: this blasphemous piece of metal puts most modern bands to shame in terms of extremity.
Apart from the intro and outro, the album’s 30 minute runtime is made up of rapid fire assaults, with tracks lasting around three minutes each. Each one is a variation on a simple theme: being fucking brutal. But not in the idiotic way: this is a deliberate attempt to outdo everything that came before them. And they succeeded brilliantly. Blasphemy was pushing a barely formed genre to its breaking point well before the figurative blaze in the northern sky.
Each track has the ferocity and subtlety of a nuclear detonation. The riffs bludgeon the listener mercilessly with massive, rumbling riffs that wallop him with repeated punches to the gut. Their lumbering forms are hideously, grotesquely distorted, and barely recognizable as riffs. Chords shift rapidly and violently underneath flurries of blast beats and garbled grunts and maniacal intonations. The poor recording quality makes the sound devolve into a mindless orgy of extremity, to which the listener helplessly succumbs. The only time the guitars emerge from the swampy morass is during the solos: rapid eruptions of screaming notes that burst forth without warning and then cut out just as suddenly. Each track continues down the hellish path laid out by the opener “Fallen Angel of Doom”, continuing an unrelenting assault on the senses in the name of blasphemy and desecration. “Goddess of Perversity” is the sole track that breaks this mold. The coupling of good (good being a relative term here) sound quality and tremolo riffs make for a grindcore vibe; it’s a deviation in terms of sound for sure, but wholly compatible with the utter destruction found on the other tracks.
The entire album is decidedly sloppy and unrestrained. It’s easy to call this simple minded or primitive, and in some aspects that’s spot on. Fallen Angel of Doom still stands as one of the ugliest, rawest slab of black metal to ever come into being. But it was groundbreaking when it was released. It pushed a new genre to its limits, smashing it and making its own perverted version, eventually creating an entirely new genre. This pioneering aspect is so often forgotten and the album is dismissed as a boorish, simple-minded mess. And it is, really. But it’s a pioneering mess, one that spawned an entire genre and turned thousands of souls to the devil’s music. That’s not something that can be said of many albums.
Fallen Angel of Doom is an absolute masterpiece.