Legion of Andromeda - Iron Scorn
At War with False Noise/Unholy Anarchy
"Death metal"
7 songs (44:00)
Release year: 2015
Reviewed by Charles
This is one of the most wilfully obtuse albums I’ve ever heard. It is relentlessly repetitive, crashingly simplistic and utterly (probably intentionally) devoid of any joy or laughter. Imagine some kind of homunculus species, with many apparently human characteristics but to whom the sophistication and artistry of which humans are capable is utterly alien. Where an appropriately practiced human can use something like, say, a fretboard, with invention and dexterity, these poor creatures can only mash ineptly at it with their cruelly misshapen paws. Their works are a sick parody of genuine human endeavour. Anyway, imagine these hypothetical beings started playing death metal and you have Legion of Andromeda. I quite like it.

Or maybe that’s wrong- the music on Iron Scorn is so mindnumbing and crude that it’s not so much a stupid album, as the kind of thing one might expect from some cleverclogs deconstructing death metal for the purposes of an art project. In any case, it was produced by Steve Albini and they list acts like Swans, Big Black, and Khanate among their key influences, if that lends any support to the hypothesis. Each track here is built around a riff. It could be a weird and languid one, like Overlord of Thunder, which channels Gorguts’s Obscura. But much more likely it will be amazingly square and rudimentary, like Cosmo Hammer, or Sociopathic Infestation, or much of the rest of the album, which comes across like a lobotomised version of Infester or Impetigo. These riffs are then repeated ad nauseam, in a filthy guitar tone, with precisely no adornments of any kind (especially no guitar solos). They never go above a defiantly boring mid-tempo pace. The drums have this plodding, porridgey feel, which somehow manages to make everything sound even more pained and lumpen. The vocals are indistinct death squawks.

At times, it is a strikingly descriptive, even evocative, album. Cosmo Hammer, for example: the title is done complete justice by the relentless “clank… clank… clank…” of the percussion, and the grinding repetition of the riffing. See also Aim at the Starless Sky, where the insistence on playing one chord over and over and over, combined with those leaden drums, genuinely conjures some kind of post-apocalyptic death-march misery. I was tempted to give it 90 / 100 just to take the piss. In any case, I cannot imagine who could possibly want to listen to this, but I am happy to learn that there are people around with such a singular vision.

Killing Songs :
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