OUR LIST OF 2017’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 14): MAZE OF TERROR, UNDERGANG, ORDER OV RIVEN CATHEDRALS

 

It’s a shitty situation. Here I am, posting more of this list on a Saturday, the weakest day of the week, measured by how may eyes alight on our site. But I’m doing my best to finish this list by February.

Still, the three songs here deserve a fireworks display more grand than what our Saturday traffic usually provides. Life isn’t fair, and it’s too damned short and miserable, too.

MAZE OF TERROR

I read through my list of candidates for this series every day, because I’m still trying to figure out what to include. When I come to this one, I see 10 asterisk marks next to it. I have a vague memory that I was trying to tell myself many months ago, “Your mind is a sieve, it loses important things every day, but don’t forget this one, you fractured motherfucker, this one you FUCKING HAVE TO REMEMBER.” And so I have.

 

 

“The Hunger” brings an explosive euphoria, like the first time I had sex, and the last time. I know that’s way too much information, but I’m just trying to be honest. Honesty is not always the best policy, but I have no serious restraints other than what’s in my own mind, and this song makes me lose my mind.

Even if you’re celibate, doesn’t this make you feel like you’re in a threesome with a pair of lions? With all the howls and the blood at the end?

Yes, I apologize again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNDERGANG

There is a good reason why death metal like this is described with references to sewers and sewage. The vocals are just as disgusting. The drilling riffs are just as foul.  The atmosphere has a similar stench. And it still makes you want to bathe in the putridity, and inhale all the reeking miasma and bobbing effluent as if it were all mother’s milk.

Okay. Once again, I should just speak for myself, and I just have. This is delicious, and disgusting, and a distinctive kind of morbid genius at work. Bow down, and hail Undergang, or they’ll rip the arms from your sockets and beat you to death with them.

This is “Skaret Smastykker“.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ORDER OV RIVEN CATHEDRALS

How can I prepare you for this? I do feel some fundamental moral responsibility to prepare you for this, much as I might feel just as if, for some reason, I had to throw you in front of a rushing subway train. I might say, “It’s going to split you apart, but your last moments will be a glorious bonfire of pain”.

I might even give you a kiss before the shove. This is the kiss, and the shove.

There’s not a lot of variety on this album, but sometimes that’s unnecessary, as here, because the full-throttle formula that generates each song like a runaway plague vector on this album is so potent that who gives a fuck?

Everything is breathless, everything is a syringe jammed into the heart with a bolus of adrenaline in the payload. I still am able (barely) to pick a favorite, and “Dead Sea Scrolls Revelations” is the one. (For our review of the album, click HERE.)