Goatwhore
Funeral Dirge for the Rotting Sun
Rotten
Okay, I admit to getting a jolly good chuckle the first time I heard the name,
Goatwhore, and jokingly told a friend before a recent show, "If they get sodomized by a live goat, I'm outta here!". Lucky for me, when this band came out on stage, they played a furious set of old-school black metal with a tinge of death. Good enough to make me pick up this CD after the show. They even threw in a couple free stickers. Woo-Hoo!
Driving home, this CD was playing in the car. I noticed the production sounded odd. Nothing too terribly bad, but just odd. Same thing when I popped it in my CD-ROM. It sounded alright on my regular stereo, but I think the weird sound stems from the CD format. In order to play it on your PC, you need to install files that come with the CD. It uses its own player which utilizes components of Windows Media Player. Also, the disc can't be played on a Mac? The songs themselves are in some data file form as opposed to the traditional "Track 1", "Track 2", etc. Enough about the silly sounding way the music is encoded, onto the music.
After a couple minutes of satanic chanting in Latin, the next few songs "Vengeance of Demonic Fury", "Blood Guilt Eucharist", and "The Serpent that Enslaves..." fucking rip! Goatwhore is a blend of raw black and death metal and tuned down sludge-punk. Kind of like early Darkthrone meets Exhorder. The vocal style of Louis Falgoust II ranges from traditional black metal to clean singing to a hardcore delivery. The rest of the band provides a solid backdrop and varies from blasting riffs to slow riffs just ripe for some pit action. Nothing too technical or complex here, but plenty for you to throw horns to. \m/\m/
This is a decent enough disc, but the way its songs are encoded seems to have an obvious effect on the way it sounds. It could just be my PC and my car stereo that make the drums sound like they were recorded on a $10 drum machine.
