Xasthur
Telepathic With The Deceased
~reviewed by Goat

I just love when someone gets into my vehicle, and, after I turn the key, they look at me wide-eyed and say, “Uhm. I don’t mean to be rude but, can we not listen to this?”  Other comments usually range from, “What in the name of [whomever they use as a curse] is THAT?” to, “Is that person gonna be okay?” and, “Are they singing or throwing up?”  Ahhhhh.  Black f*cking metal!

And so it goes with Xasthur.  Intensely beautiful psychosis.  Ambient noise desolation and just pure, straight-up cold void black metal.  Like the first Burzum albums.  In fact, if you’re one of those people who has ever wondered to yourself, “Damn it, why can’t anyone just make albums like Burzum any more?”  Here’s your jackpot.  Fans of Judas Iscariot, Havohej, etc., take heart!

The thing I really like about this Xasthur work is the epic, folkish texture it has to it.  Not quite as much as say, Summoning or the first few Enslaved albums, but just enough to really keep me grinning the whole way through.  Which is to say, I enjoy the conversation between the cheerfully morose harmonies and the chaotic dissonance.  This is exactly why I ever loved black metal in the first place; it is terrible and beautiful all at once.  It sounds like life.  Real life.  With all the fertilizer and artifice stripped away.  

Definitely add Xasthur’s Telepathic With The Deceased to your collection.  I can’t imagine a black metaller not enjoying this album.  And, a raise of the glass to Xasthur for the Kutna Hora photo on the back album art, for the front cover painting, and for making a summer-released album cold enough to tide us over ‘til winter.  [If macabre/funerary art like the Xasthur album art interests you, I’ve run across a well-done and lovingly kept site at: http://www3.sympatico.ca/tapholov/  ].

Track Listing:
1. Entrance Into Nothingness
2. Slaughtered Useless Beings In A Nihilistic Dream
3. Abysmal Depths Are Flooded
4. May Your [can't read] (Void?) Become As Deep As My Hate!
5. Telepathic With The Deceased
6.  [A?, I?] Walk Beyond Utter Darkness (Instrumental)
7. Cursed Revelations
8. Drown Into Eternal Twilight
9. Murdered Echoes Of The Mind
10. Exit

http://www.moribundcult.com/index2.html
 

07/13/04