Leviathan-Tentacles of Whorror
Moribund Records-DEAD52-2004
By Josh Phillips
It is a damp, dark night. The moon is full and the wind howls through the trees. You’ve been stranded and forced to walk along a treacherous dirt path. Off in the distance, you sense a faint movement and your heart jumps. A shadowy form slips behind the trees in front of you, terror grips your heart and you try to flee, but you cannot move, your legs are frozen in place. Your mind goes numb and a biting pain roars through your back. You look up to see a darkened form with a bloody axe and suddenly, all goes black.
These images are what come to mind when listening to the latest release from the one-man, U.S. black metal band,
Leviathan.
Tentacles of Whorror is an eerie, frightening, terrorizing black metal opus. It is a roller coaster of sound, morphing from dark, clean guitars glowing eerily to head banging, grinding riffs to introspective ambient moments. 12 tracks and almost 73 minutes of mind bleeding screams and hell unleashed await the listener of this work.
One thing that really impresses me is that the mastermind behind the band, Wrest, not only writes all of the music and lyrics, but he performs all vocals and instruments himself and isn’t lacking in any area. The music blends together perfectly, and all the instruments are played well and fit the music. The bass even comes out of the muck to complement the guitars very often. Unlike a lot of black metal though, the guitar here is not the cold, icy tone you would expect. It greets you with an almost warm, choking on blood atmosphere. There was even a blood red vinyl release of this album and it couldn’t have been put on a more fitting format. Wrest knew where he was going with the release, and achieved it wonderfully. Some call this suicide black metal and that seems like an adequate description, though one might add “homicide” as well as this conjures up images of being pursued by a madman through the woods, only waking to realize that you are the true pursuer.
From the first eerie guitar waves, to the final glowing ambient piece, this is black metal the way it should be. It rips and tears with blazing blastbeat pieces, slows and grinds away, soars in epic songs such as “Requiem for a Turd World,” and stops to let us think about all we have done in the aforementioned introspective ambient sections such as the ending one in “The History of Rape.” A cohesive piece of vicious black metal done right. The songs are similar, but with so many little variations that it stays incredibly interesting. In one word: Terrorizing.
8.5/10
Official Moribund Records Website
