NATTEFROST

In the incestuous, freewheeling black metal scene, side projects come and go faster than anyone with a life can keep up with them. NATTEFROST is on his second solo album, and this member of CARPATHIAN FOREST spends his time here gleefully taking the piss (at times literally),mocking black metal (the "clean vocals" in " Dinsadansdjeveldyrkaar" are as ridiculous as the song title),composing toilet-humor skits between songs, and going for the low road whenever possible (let's hear it for "Preteen Deathfuck").

The photo of (presumably) Nattefrost himself, corpse-painted, buck naked in the tub, cradling a bottle of booze, tells you more about the off-the-rails intent and crude debauchery of this audio filthride than any review could. When he's not dicking around, though, he comes up with some of that cool, thrash-out, fukk-off black metal that causes involuntary headbanging and shrieks of ghastly approval. The first song alone is a burner of almost IMPALED NAZARENE proportions, furious, fast and snarling, and the pace rarely lets up throughout.

The song titles are telling: "Goat Worship", "Primitive Death", "Black Metal Suicide (Claws of Perdition)". Really, this would be a disposable joke, but for the fact that it does rip and tear pretty hard. It's basic, head-down, over the top thrashing black metal, lyrically ludicrous even by the genre's outlandish standards, but possessed of enough methamphetamine energy to get even the most dour purist headbanging.

Two tracks consist of intimately-recorded bodily functions (a tradition carried over from debut "Blood and Vomit"),and a pointless fourteen-minute sound collage, "The Death of Nattefrost", is a time-waster, but these can easily be skipped. That leaves you with a good half hour or so of fast-action black metal thrashitude, low on originality but high on sardonic wrath, just the way fans of the aforementioned like it. Just barely worth a 7, but how can you not like it?