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(January 2009)
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REVENGE (Can): "Victory. Intolerance. Mastery" CD
(Osmose Productions)
The German PEST is certainly my favourity of all the bands running around with this same monicker. This, their third album, carries on with the Mediaeval theme of Death and the bubonic blague which devastated Europe during the mid 1300s, a time when the causes for the epidemic were not understood, thus compounding its horrors. Just imagine, the stench of rotting corpses piled up in rat-infested streets for lack of manpower to bury them; the sight of the houses of the infected and the dying with their windows boarded up; the Catholic clerics at their wits' ends in the face of the futility of prayers and ministry in trying to allay the wrath of "God"; the relentless advance of the disease, from house to house, from friends to relatives, while you exist in fear of whether you will be next; the total collapse of the local economy and public services... Such terrors are so effectively conjured up by this German horde, that the masochistic desire to acquire their records can only be explained in terms of the innate human morbidity. "Vado Mori" is not too different from "Ad se Ipsum", the album we were selling nearly a year ago now, but it is definitely less raw and cacophonous than the nevertheless unmissable "Ara"; the songs appear to be faster and slightly more aggressive, while the irregularities in density and the ropiness in the performace have been ironed out. The latter does not, however, mean that the band's unique sound has ended up at the bottom of a cold latrine: the horrible howls, the fearful tension, and the general atmosphere remain intact. Thus, another compulsive buy, to add to the previous two. Ketzer is better organised than their previous label, so hopefully we will not be told that the album is sold out after just 1000 copies. Reviewed by AK-47.
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