Nazarene Whore/Nocturnal Evil – Split 7”
Iron Bonehead have returned with a slab of the ancient school of death/black sodomy with 2 one man bands eager to rape their influences and create blackened death with little care or concern for originality. Knowing that such damning characteristics mean nothing as long as conviction, sound and most importantly, “delivery” is of an acceptable quality, we venture into the grooves of this 7” for a fiery beating.
Up first is 3 tracks from Michigan’s own Nazarene Whore. Of course we’re interested to hear what someone from our home state brings to the table, so we groomed our goat and brought him to the computer to witness the devilish perversion spewed forth. Nazarene Whore embraces an abrasive drum machine driven sound that idles between old Beherit and Ildjarn. Punk addled riffs are hurled at the listener like bloody knuckles. Even though the music is going down into a pit of sonic redundancy, N.W. are swinging the entire way with the intent to kill. There’s got to be some value in that, right? Even if I were to have purchased this 7”, there’s nothing terribly impressive on display here to warrant dragging me away from Forest Poetry or The Oath of Black Blood.
Argentina’s Nocturnal Evil crawl up from the Southern Hemisphere (and grave) with a breathy blasphemous tone that blasts with lo-fi darkness and a blanketing reverb technique that makes this deathly black attack sound like it was erupting out of a cave. Only offering one track on this split, it’s hard to say how an entire albums worth of this old cryptic style of devil war metal will stand the test of time as it has been done endlessly, but for one track, it is a decent nostalgic defilement of the sound waves from this 1 man “band”. -Marty
Iron Bonehead
Worm Gear 