BLEEDING FIST – Devil’s Ferox (War Productions, Portugal – 300 copies on Cassette format)

by Janet Willis

Bleeding Fist is for the serious old-school black metal fan with their own vile mixture of the first and second waves of black metal that’ll scorch the scalp right off your skull. Bleeding Fist is a refreshing return to form, back when the spirit and soul of the bands were to spread and portray vigilance.

The percussion is a battalion of iron cloven horses heated to red hot stamping all over a mass of what is now sweltering and horrifically foul smelling flesh, still screaming like lobsters being shoved in to the boiling cauldron.

The riffs are the quintessential stripped punkish/thrash chugging chainsaw ass-ripper buzzes true to the pernicious roots of BM. Some of the songs toward the end of the album are even more bastardized through some sort of baptism in nuclear contaminated excrement resulting in a distorted and perverted sound so sludge ridden and grimy at times and heavy that it can only be described as what one would expect the inside of the colon of a 500 year old human that hadn’t taken a shit since the Renaissance.

Other times they sound like a very diesel powered hate spewing eviscerating black metal shitstorm that’ll invoke lucid visions of barbaric torture and genital mutilation. Tracks like “Morbid Psychotic Distortion” sound like Kreator experiencing fellatio given by a jagged razor toothed dominatrix courtesy of old Sodom. There’s even a few sophisticated moments to be found and reminisced in like early Immortal/Emperor/Satyricon, etc. with technical arpeggio melodies fried in tremolo picking and that tin-like sound that really make it almost defendable against metal snobbery.

I also recommend alongside Bleeding Fist: Hammergoat, Cursed Christ, Dethroned Christ, Cultes Des Ghoules, and Gravewurm.

Audio and info links:
http://www.myspace.com/bleedingfist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afMjAbRHOxQ

Available form Moribund on MCD and probably most black metal/extreme metal retailers so check around if you don’t do the tape thing.