Dead Reptile Shrine - Praise Cemetary (2013)

I remember my first exposure to Dead Reptile Shrine, probably about a decade ago, and being quite disappointed that a band with such an amazing name wasn't really delivering an appealing mesh of noise and black metal. Perhaps I wasn't listening to it with the appropriate mindset, since their approach was such an unusual, raw sound that placed them well out on the experimental fringes of Finnish black, well past Oranssi Pazuzu or Jumalhämärä and out where only enigmas like Circle of Ouroborus dare to dwell. Or perhaps the project just hadn't borne out the most interesting of eclectic, musical fruits it was capable of producing. I can promise you that ten years later, as I've gone back to discover their later, more recent efforts, that Dead Reptile Shrine has gotten no less strange than their formative recordings. If anything, Praise Cemetary is an even more anomalous concoction than those I've heard before it, but I have to say, despite the fact that this sort of album is only going to grok with a niche within a niche of gonzo extreme metal fans, there's a bizarre form of hypnosis that overtook me as I was listening through, which allowed me to bypass some of its flaws and focus in occasionally on its mesmeric abstractions.

The biggest factor working against this album is its lack of consistency, as it sort of warps all over a landscape of ideas, without any overarching cohesion, no method to its madness. To that extent it feels like a group of random recordings pasted together to form a full-length, and that can hurt the experience of listening to it. However, when I look at it as a collection of individual tracks and not so much as a structured, aesthetic exercise, the little hooks begin to sink in. On the surface, it's a raw as fuck bedroom black metal recording, with buzzing, droning or distorted guitars, wretched rasping vocals, and a slight penchant for dipping into a few more traditional BM riffs in spots. But as the track list gets deeper in, there's a transformation towards more of a pure, sparse ambient style that is occasionally littered with guitar or vocal effects. This is where the album really started to earn its keep for me, since I found pieces like the 12 minute "Death of a Sorcerer King" trance-inducing and eerie, like a rustic Lustmord tracking an indie horror film out in some woodland. The experimental edge of this doesn't always work, like in "Dimension of Mirrors" where some similar ritualistic ambient music and weird, distant spoken words are crapped on by a distorted, low guitar or bass tone that does them absolutely no service except to sound like its trolling the rest of the song.

Perhaps most interesting are the cuts that dwell between these two polarities of ambient noise and black metal, like "Unicursal Hex" or "Inside the Marble Polyandrium", which are truly unique, capturing the pure rawness of rehearsal-level demo black metal but playing out in such clamorous, often grooving, deconstructed forms that I couldn't tear my ears off of them. Weird, swaying guitars that occasionally bite off some disjointed Eastern melodies, as bass lines swerve through unapologetic patterns that seem entirely sporadic since they never land on a single damn note you want or expect. Meanwhile the vocals are being splayed out in tormented, husky groans, or cleaning wails to create a cacophony of unrest. The percussion is very unkempt, crashing snares and almost random thuds which make the whole thing lurch along with a drunken pacing. I'm sure there must be some improvisational components to Dead Reptile Shrine here, or rather an illusion of such, because to write this way intentionally would be sadism of a high order, but that's not to say that I wasn't fascinated by trying to figure out what in blazes was happening.

Don't get me wrong, it's disharmonious, dissonant, atonal, often painful and directionless, to the point that I can't imagine more than a small handful of listeners would be able to tolerate it for more than a short period. Not every track is equally grating, but just the fact that some of the more sensible pieces are wedged up against such counter-rational nightmares can manifest a degree of frustration. I can't say Dead Reptile Shrine is quite 'there' yet, because often what they do is just so far afield of the consonants or familiars of the metal genre, and this album doesn't have an answer to pulling it all together. So it's not a recommendation from me, but there is a compelling pulse beating somewhere within the black heart of this serpent, its just too irregular at this time to promote long term survival.

Verdict: Indifference [6.25/10]

http://www.neuroscan.org/drs/