Root - Hell Symphony

By Andy Curtis-Brignell. Root are one of those bands that never quite seem to get their due. As part of the preternaturally influential but still obscure crop of early Eastern European black/death bands with Master’s Hammer and KAT, the Czech act have their die-hard fans, but in my experience they primarily focus on the band’s debut album Zjeveni and Hell Symphony’s follow-up The Temple in the Underworld

By Andy Curtis-Brignell.


Root are one of those bands that never quite seem to get their due. As part of the preternaturally influential but still obscure crop of early Eastern European black/death bands with Master’s Hammer and KAT, the Czech act have their die-hard fans, but in my experience they primarily focus on the band’s debut album Zjeveni and Hell Symphony’s follow-up The Temple in the Underworld, being the two albums closest to the Venom/Hellhammer/Bathory template. However Root, despite 30+ years of existence, have never made a true misstep and, bucking the trend that saw most 80s survivors churn out either tedious epic metal or AOR crud (hi Metallica) their more recent work was amongst their most creatively fertile - toe to toe, Black Seal and The Book wipe the floor with their late 90s/early 2000s competition.

But this isn’t a career retrospective - I’m here to write about my favourite Root album, Hell Symphony. I could start by talking about how comparatively polished the production is, or how excellently the central concept (a form of sonic grimoire, each song dealing with a particular demon) is executed. Instead, I want to look briefly at how astonishingly varied this album is. Ranging from technically stunning thrash to creeping, chugging death metal via the sonic abjection of early black metal, Hell Symphony is rounded off with a touch of classical clean guitar and the inimitable operatic ‘Attila Csihar sings Verdi’ vocals of band leader Big Boss, Hell Symphony covers more ground in its spare 41 minutes than most bands do in their entire careers, without ever feeling contrived. Indeed, the album as a whole gives the impression of being streamlined and produced with a supernatural level of restraint and economy - dynamically this is one of the most interesting metal records of all time, with nothing ever feeling too saturated or overblown whilst maintaining a consistently high level of engagement and excitement. This relationship between the albums brevity and its dynamic content also keeps the album feeling curiously unresolved, as if it could loop endlessly around some ancient darkened grotto until the demons conjured within are ready to rise. Hell Symphony is exactly that - an orchestrated piece designed to show the listener around the band’s demonic weltanschauung.

However the concept never overtakes the execution, and whilst the songs benefit from context they also shine individually, "Belial" and "Loki" being particular highlights. There’s an unexpected accessibility to Hell Symphony that belies the overtly dark and satanic imagery and concept, not to mention the band’s relative obscurity. The thundering drums and grooves remind me more of Beneath the Remains era Sepultura than anything being put out by black metal acts at the time, whilst the intertwining guitar melodies and ripping thrash sections resemble nothing less than some kind of Mercyful Fate/RTL-era Metallica collaboration, albeit with vocals from a drunken, phantasm-beset Pavarotti as opposed to some generic leather-clad showman.

There’s a fundamental sincerity to Hell Symphony that I think may be one of the reasons why it has failed to see mainstream success. There are no pyrotechnics to their diabolism, and there’s no sensationalism in their performance. Putting aside the impressive guitar licks and how easy it is to bang your head to it, there’s an almost indefinable humility to the record that makes you feel as though the band aren't simply paying lip service to any aspect of their performance. They believe, so we believe. I think that might be the highest compliment I’m able to pay to such an interesting, varied, dynamic but ultimately restrained piece of metal art.

Behexen - By The Blessing of Satan

By Andy Curtis-Brignell. The lazy man’s Behexen review goes like this: use the typical ‘raw black metal’ signifiers; talk for a paragraph or so about the so-called ‘Finnish Filth’ movement; mention Beherit; close. Essentially discussion of Behexen, or at least this period of their existence, is typified by their apparent

By Andy Curtis-Brignell.


The lazy man’s Behexen review goes like this: use the typical ‘raw black metal’ signifiers; talk for a paragraph or so about the so-called ‘Finnish Filth’ movement; mention Beherit; close. Essentially discussion of Behexen, or at least this period of their existence, is typified by their apparent ‘regressiveness’ and primitivism. That’s not what I want to talk about.

I’m consistently fascinated by liminal spaces in music, particularly when one can follow a band through their career and find points of flux - moments of uncertainty or experimentation that add a new dimension to music you are apparently familiar with. When we join the band for By the Blessing of Satan, we land squarely in the midst of one of these locus points. The band’s debut album Rituale Satanum from four years earlier, whilst a satisfying piece of work in its own right, is epitomised by a meat-and-potatoes approach to black metal, with very little beyond simple ferocity distinguishing it from the rest of the early 2000s swell of resurgent Euro-BM. This wasn’t helped by a particularly hollow and generic wind-tunnel production job that made it difficult to pinpoint the songwriting chops displayed on its followup.

By contrast, BTBOS has a thick but granular quality to its sound, conjuring visions of vast, sharp boulders rolling over and over you in the bowels of the earth, while Hoath Torog’s white-noise shrieks ceaselessly peak and crash like the waves of some awful sunless sea. Sonically the album appears to have been far more deliberately engineered to highlight the band’s growing talent in terms of dynamics, pacing and melody - because this is a truly melodic album despite its pace and ferocity.

Behexen 2014. Photos by Carmelo Española.

Whilst there are storming numbers such as the opening title track and the raging "Fist of the Satanist" where speed and intensity approaches Antaeus levels of belligerence, the real meat of the album comes in the mid paced numbers such as "Black Metal Baptism". The melodic interplay displayed on this track in particular is astonishing, with an unusually (for black metal, anyway) prominent bass guitar providing both a dense bedrock for the song and a deeply harmonious counterpoint to the yearningly overdriven guitars. "Black Metal Baptism" resonates with deeply felt emotion, which is all the more remarkable when both the title and lyrics seem to evoke a kind of black metal manifesto:

Black metal baptism opened the gates to darkness
and gave me the powers of sorcerers
The sign of black pentagram burned deep in my heart.

Arguably since the work of depressive pioneers such as Strid black metal has aesthetically been torn in two apparently opposed directions: the melancholy and the furious. The greatest acts are, in my opinion, those who can bridge the gap between the two, smelting something new and complex from an overused forge. With "Black Metal Baptism", Behexen reconcile these two concepts beautifully and crucially this is done seamlessly within the context of the album as a whole. By the Blessing of Satan has all the speed, anger and intensity of the most popular Norsecore but with a sense of pathos and depth of feeling that’s often alien to this strand of the genre. Sadly the main influence that seems to have been borrowed from this period of Behexen’s work seems to be an aping of the bands almost romantic fervour for satan-worship (count how many ‘orthodox’ black metal bands sprung up between 2004-6, Ill wait) rather than focusing on the sincere emotion that lay behind it.

After the success of this album and having become key influencers in the genre, the band would travel further down this melodic path with the followup to this album, My Soul for His Glory. Unfortunately the tradeoff seemed to be unequal hereon out, as the highs and lows of BTBOS are normalised into a more anonymous, if more harmonious, whole. By the Blessing of Satan truly then exists in a liminal space - between chaos and order, triumph and sorrow, hatred and love.

Judas Iscariot - To Embrace the Corpses Bleeding

By Andy Curtis-Brignell. I discovered my 'thing' pretty late. Not that, don't be stupid - I'm referring to the virulent notion that there's SOMETHING you're supposed to do with your life. Normally caught some time before 'career goals' replace 'I want to be an astronaut' but after you stop believing in Santa

By Andy Curtis-Brignell.


I discovered my 'thing' pretty late. Not that, don't be stupid - I'm referring to the virulent notion that there's SOMETHING you're supposed to do with your life. Normally caught some time before 'career goals' replace 'I want to be an astronaut' but after you stop believing in Santa, children experience this illness chiefly in temporary fads and phases, but, like polio, sometimes it fucks you up for life. Black Metal was my thing, and I caught it late, at 15. Judas Iscariot were in the first crop of 5-10 black metal bands I ever heard, and 15 years on I'm still feeling the effects of this exposure.

The man behind Judas Iscariot, Andrew Harris, seems to have caught it early, putting out the project's first demo in 1992, particularly when one considers that most of the black metal albums we consider genre defining hadn't been made yet. In this sense, Harris was perfectly positioned at the nexus of the burgeoning black metal culture, and this is reflected in Judas Iscariot's music. Black Metal, or at least its original iterations, can generally be identified by region sonically – the descending chord progressions and melancholic chill of Scandinavian black metal; the awkward timing and ascending nodes of French and Benelux black metal; the bass heavy and percussive South American scene, and so on. Harris combined these elements in various forms at different points in Judas Iscariot's discography, but on To Embrace the Corpses Bleeding, the final Judas Iscariot full length, he finally presents his unified vision and immediately withdraws from the scene in the liner notes of the CD. How bold, how dramatic, how enfant terrible! That this is a self-reflexive move is beyond doubt – this is 'gaze on my works ye mighty and despair' territory.

Where previous albums seemed to be challenges to other bands or movements - see Distant in Solitary Night's precise, metronomic deconstruction of post-Transilvanian Hunger Darkthrone and Heaven in Flames' two fingered salute to Emperor's speed and synthesizers – To Embrace... is both varied and unified. It also has the most consistent and effective sound production of Harris's entire career, the warmth and fat tone of the rhythm section presenting an elegant juxtaposition against the icebound guitar and vocals – the music was written in the USA and the lyrics in Romania and Germany, and you can feel the old world and the new straining against one another. This, along with the artwork lifted from Dore's Ancient Mariner engravings, makes perfect sense when one considers Harris's immediate relocation to Europe following the completion of the Moonlight Butchery EP the same year as this album. His last works before escaping into solitude speak of dislocation, isolation – a perfect soundtrack for the vast ocean Harris would cross both personally and musically. However this is no forlorn retreat. From the liner notes to the strident song titles which proclaim 'In the Valley of Death, I am their King', this is the king withdrawing to his mountain, not the creature crawling beneath it. The overt fatalism of Dethroned, Conquered and Forgotten two years before feels a million miles away. This might be the end, but it brings with it the winds of Ragnarok – maybe not a bang, but certainly not a whimper.