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“Make love, make war”
The overwhelming feeling as the music of Blood Axis’ first full-length album seeps through the speakers is of despair. This is a record about mercilessness, hatred, and corrupting power, as is pretty much all Blood Axis’ music. It is challenging, not because it is loud or abrasive, but because it is relentlessly misanthropic, and refuses at any point to offer hope for human salvation. The heroes bathe in blood, the righteous burn alive, liquor rots good men’s souls and Thor laughs hollowly from his desolate throne, because war and hatred will always rule the world. And Blood Axis are, perhaps, thoroughly okay with that.
This was an important record for me in my evolution as a music lover, and an artist in general, in that it forced me to re-evaluate the artistic merit of appropriation. Huge parts of this record are, for want of a better word, unoriginal. Two lyrics, two voices, two samples, from A Clockwork Orange to Ezra Pound. These are set about with dark ambient atmospherics, long, simplistic keyboard compositions somewhat resemble the last two Burzum albums, and, perhaps more startlingly, some relatively straight-forward guitar and drums rock arrangements, which mesh with this dark stew of sound to create something truly powerful and affecting. What Moynihan has basically done is to create the musical equivalent of a collage, pulling elements from the flotsam and jetsam of culture and turning them, collectively, into something that is, whilst not greater than the sum of its parts, somehow other than them.
Like all the best artists dabbling in the dark artistic waters where great art and extreme politics of every stripe collide, Blood Axis never drop the mask of ambiguity. We are forced to take the music at face value, and appreciate it for what it is, and what it is is very good. Not perhaps, the most startlingly original thing ever (Laibach have been here before, and NON) but good nonetheless. It alternates between the powerful, crushing bombast of tracks like "Reign I Forever" and "Storm of Steel" and more reflective, brooding pieces like the brilliant title track, "The Gospel of Inhumanity", which wraps a long sample from the Wicker Man around a fantastic keyboard peace and turns it into a final condemnation of all humanity, with both managing, somehow, to fit into the same landscape. Atmospherically, there is little to touch this: this is panzer tracks grinding, witches burning at the stake, madmen raving, cannons thundering, children crying, hell itself opening up and swallowing the world. Powerful and thought-provoking stuff.
Blood Axis always have been, and still remain, a somewhat under-rated band in one of the worlds least popular genres. Probably half their exposure has been through the fact that Moynihan co-authored the infamous piece of black metal journalism Lords of Chaos. For this album alone, as well as for several other classic works (although admittedly the catalogue is inconsistent), they deserve a lot more. For fans of the above mentioned forebears, as well as early Current 93 and Death in June, Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse and all that jazz, but probably also a good bridge from industrial for the more adventurous fans of artists like :wumpscut: and early Skinny Puppy. Not eclipse quality, but highly recommended all the same.
Quietus
The overwhelming feeling as the music of Blood Axis’ first full-length album seeps through the speakers is of despair. This is a record about mercilessness, hatred, and corrupting power, as is pretty much all Blood Axis’ music. It is challenging, not because it is loud or abrasive, but because it is relentlessly misanthropic, and refuses at any point to offer hope for human salvation. The heroes bathe in blood, the righteous burn alive, liquor rots good men’s souls and Thor laughs hollowly from his desolate throne, because war and hatred will always rule the world. And Blood Axis are, perhaps, thoroughly okay with that.
This was an important record for me in my evolution as a music lover, and an artist in general, in that it forced me to re-evaluate the artistic merit of appropriation. Huge parts of this record are, for want of a better word, unoriginal. Two lyrics, two voices, two samples, from A Clockwork Orange to Ezra Pound. These are set about with dark ambient atmospherics, long, simplistic keyboard compositions somewhat resemble the last two Burzum albums, and, perhaps more startlingly, some relatively straight-forward guitar and drums rock arrangements, which mesh with this dark stew of sound to create something truly powerful and affecting. What Moynihan has basically done is to create the musical equivalent of a collage, pulling elements from the flotsam and jetsam of culture and turning them, collectively, into something that is, whilst not greater than the sum of its parts, somehow other than them.
Like all the best artists dabbling in the dark artistic waters where great art and extreme politics of every stripe collide, Blood Axis never drop the mask of ambiguity. We are forced to take the music at face value, and appreciate it for what it is, and what it is is very good. Not perhaps, the most startlingly original thing ever (Laibach have been here before, and NON) but good nonetheless. It alternates between the powerful, crushing bombast of tracks like "Reign I Forever" and "Storm of Steel" and more reflective, brooding pieces like the brilliant title track, "The Gospel of Inhumanity", which wraps a long sample from the Wicker Man around a fantastic keyboard peace and turns it into a final condemnation of all humanity, with both managing, somehow, to fit into the same landscape. Atmospherically, there is little to touch this: this is panzer tracks grinding, witches burning at the stake, madmen raving, cannons thundering, children crying, hell itself opening up and swallowing the world. Powerful and thought-provoking stuff.
Blood Axis always have been, and still remain, a somewhat under-rated band in one of the worlds least popular genres. Probably half their exposure has been through the fact that Moynihan co-authored the infamous piece of black metal journalism Lords of Chaos. For this album alone, as well as for several other classic works (although admittedly the catalogue is inconsistent), they deserve a lot more. For fans of the above mentioned forebears, as well as early Current 93 and Death in June, Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse and all that jazz, but probably also a good bridge from industrial for the more adventurous fans of artists like :wumpscut: and early Skinny Puppy. Not eclipse quality, but highly recommended all the same.
Quietus