I do wonder what the band was trying to achieve when they were writing this album. I’d say it’s a joke, where they’re trying to derive humour from playing music that is intentionally awful but I can’t be certain if this is the case, as so much effort has been put into being dreadful that it’s entirely possible that they actually think this is good music that people wanted to hear. It’s also possible that out of sheer hatred for the listener that they deliberately sought to craft the worst music imaginable. Regardless of their intent, this is a dreadful, offensively terrible album. It’s not so much a step down from the two preceding Nokturnal Mortum full lengths as it is a tumble down 10 flights of stairs from them – it’s a trainwreck which is full of ideas that are either too sloppily executed or stupid to ever work. Shit at its finest, thy name is NeChrist.

There are numerous glaring flaws with this album but the one that rises above all is how flat out… bad it sounds. The melodic sense of the riffs and keys is non-existent, with the melodies sounding like garbage throughout. Not a single riff will stick with you but the entire time a track is on they grate with how badly they’re constructed. The keys are a similar story and are literally thrown on top of the riffs with zero regard for how they go together, and indeed they do not mesh in any way whatsoever. The two layers clash against one another in a very unlikable way; it makes for truly ugly music in the worst possible sense. Don’t get me wrong here; I have no issue with amelodic, dissonant or otherwise ugly and abrasive music but this clearly wasn’t constructed as anything along the lines of Obscura and what not; it uses the same stylistic features of folk music and symphonic black metal as their past work while missing out on everything that makes those albums and the style as a whole appealing. Or to put it another way, they took their melody driven style and didn’t write any good melodies for it. Since this is the fabric of the music, it is rendered entirely worthless and awful; the album is a total non-starter.

And even when the keys and riffs aren’t grinding against one another (which seldom occurs) both manage to be wholly forgettable and bland; the same can be said of the overly simplistic, restrictive and generic thrash-inspired drumming (a substantial regression compared to the stellar drumming on Goat Horns) and the much weaker vocal performance that doesn’t take charge in the music as it usually would. On top of this are the folk sections, which sound less like traditional Ukrainian folk music and more like bad Southern American folk music. These sections are all over these tracks and sound terrible every single time. Throw on top of this what sounds like elephant flatulence at some points and shouts of ‘Yahoo!’ at others and the album goes from absurdly awful-sounding to downright comical.

Have I made my point yet? This is complete trash and I never want to hear it again.