FŌR - Blakaz Askǭ Hertô
Iron Bonehead Productions
Black/Death
5 songs (29:17)
Release year: 2013
Reviewed by Charles

Scratching in the corners of extreme metal’s basement, we find FŌR, sniffing and scuttling in search of ever danker niches. In some respects, this reminds me of a blackened companion to bands like Encoffination, whose music shows laudably little interest in concepts like the ‘riff’, instead seeking to- very slowly- enswamp the listener in mulch. Chords are belched out and then just left to fester, devoid of any sense of songwriting structure. How inappropriate it would be for music all about death and rotting to have any sense of direction, right?

That is the spirit of Blakaz Askō Hertō. Not quite as slow and deathlike as Encoffination but they come very close. The first couple of tracks on this half-hour EP feature oddball squirts of blasting, but the tremolo picking and double kick drumming always have a lumpen feel, and the band/project (these Swedes are so damned anonymous I don’t even know how many there are, but it has the feel of a one-man gig to me) seems far more at home with creepy sonic oozing. Chthonian Initiation for example, is a seven minute smear of shapeless guitar chords, deeply unpleasant vocal snorts, and sluggish drum beats which pick up momentum on occasion only to sink again into lethargy. It is abstract, and horrible to listen to, eventually winding down into a hypnotic drum rhythm that almost sounds like hands clapping.

Final track, Lineage of the Amorphous takes up over a third of the total running time, and as such seems like FŌR’s definitive statement, for this release at least. It’s first few minutes contain little but arrhythmic crashes of distorted guitar and sporadic flourishes of hyperactive percussion soloing. Later, it picks up temporarily into what may loosely be termed black metal, but of a cruelly misshapen variety. Overall, a weird and obtuse recording.

Killing Songs :
Lineage of the Amorphous
Charles quoted no quote
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