Ever find yourself standing in an abandoned auto salvage yard at midnight on the Winter Solstice, frozen beneath the spotlight of a bone white moon, listening with growing unease in your guts as the razorcold wind rips through a thousand rusted exhaust manifolds with a sound like a metallic satyr blowing a funeral dirge from a set of chrome pan pipes? Yeah, me neither. However, there are a couple of ways to make the above scenario a reality. You could drop a metric assload of microdot and have someone inflict blunt force trauma to the back of your skull with a mace. Not a very popular option, that. Or, you could slap on Generations of the Void by Shrine Of Flesh.

 

I am spectacularly unqualified to review music. I’m just going to admit that right up front. I don’t know shit about music. I know a bass has four strings and a guitar has six. That’s pretty much where my technical knowledge of music ends. So I’m going to approach my music reviews from an aesthetic standpoint. I don’t listen to music anyway - I feel it. Which is why I can so easily tune out the treacly shit that gets pumped out over the loudspeakers at my place of employment: that’s not music, it’s the musical equivalent of cilantro. I’ve been listening to metal since 1983, and I’ve mostly listened to it on headphones: first through those spongy little circles of black foam that hooked up to that oversized cassette player that clipped onto your belt like a plastic albatross, now through a pair of earbuds plugged into the 11.3 days worth of nihilism I have uploaded into my iTunes library. Because, for whatever reasons, playing metal aloud at volumes one decibel below plunging a serrated steak knife into your ear canal is not socially acceptable. Yeah, okay. My neighbors can drive around with their bass cranked up loud enough to dislodge kidney stones, but I can’t listen to Opeth on eleven? Fuck you all. Anyway. Every song is a story. Whether or not the story I see unfolding in my head as the song plays out is the one the band intended to be projected is immaterial.

 

All I know is that Generations of the Void conjured up an image of a scrap metal symphony, intricate as a mechanical Diablerie. Reptilian demons slamming picked-clean bones against ancient radiators. Vocals by the vilest, most sonorous priest ever to bellow unholy incantations into the biggest of stone church bells, backed by a choir of banshees vomiting up nails and vultures rending flesh. But within the grimness is beauty: haunting melodies and crystalline notes, fragile as hand blown glass. It’s like watching one of those jewelry box ballerinas play out in the fungoid rotted boiler room of Hell’s basement, enclosed within a circle of furiously masturbating imps and weeping nuns. There’s a solid core of beauty here, hidden within a cathedral of corruption, but still pure, constantly in motion. That core is a rare thing in metal. Not that its absence detracts from those not seeking it. But its presence here is not an embellishment, or bling. It’s the seed around which the darkness has grown and solidified, enclosing it with reverence or greed, or a perverted combination of both. That’s what’s had me listening to this is slack-jawed awe for the past few days: that virgin core.

 

Shrine Of Flesh has presented us with a goddamned holy gift. They’ve tapped into something primal, something so long buried in the earth beneath decades of decay that it’s become sacred. Reach down through the darkness and touch it, and be burned to the bone with awe. You’ll never know a more excruciating exultation.