AOSOTH

AOSOTH is the side project of MKM, a member of those nasty Frenchmen ANTAEUS, so at a minimum you can with some certainly predict that it is going to be a scathing affair, whether it was his intention to make it that way or not; it is a genetic thing, not something you can turn on and off like a light switch. In cahoots with project partner BST (ex-ABORTED, BALROG),the lettered one has crafted a barbarous album of medium-sized durational appeal, one that can at the very least serve as a lesson in the art of the bestial and the disorderly.

In a pecan shell, "Ashes of Angels" balances blasts of razorblade shredding for Satan with steady-paced excursions into suffocating chord washes and corrosive tones. A representative example of the latter would be "Path of Twisted Light", which greets the listener with waves of dissonant menace after two album-opening Christ crushers called "Songs without Lungs" (huh?) and the title track. Even then the song can't help but launch into a half-minute of speeding murder just to make certain you were still paying strict attention to AOSOTH's perverse hymnal. It does seem a little strange to include a cover of ANTAEUS' adult contemporary radio hit "Inner War". Then again, it is MKM's party and he can invite whomever the hell he wants.

The truth of it is that "Ashes of Angels" is a sturdy, uncompromisingly vicious affair that hits with as many moments of above average, yet largely undistinguished, black metal ferocity as it does with worthwhile forays into pants-pissing passages of sheer terror. Odds are that the bulls and bears of the black metal market — those rapidly obeisant to the throne of ANTAEUS firmly in the former group — will find "Ashes of Angels" either a solid, if unspectacular, album or one for which the penalty for failure to purchase is life imprisonment in Pelican Bay. As far as everyone else is concerned, "Ashes of Angels" does not suck.