Fuck God-Disease Process

At first glance, Otargos are an ultra-orthodox, bludgeoningly blasphemous black metal act in the vein of, say, Behexen. It’s all about the rusty-cudgel tremolo battering and black-mass melodic hooks. It relies on its hideous energy, without which it is nothing, and it is rarely let down. At times it is the kind of whirlwind that revels in the fact that it can only be described in cliché- there is an imperious Satanic majesty to its dense picking and almost-drowned-out vocals that transmogrifies the title from puerile “Fuck God”-ism into a statement of heretical delight. In fact, the lyrics here are concerned with more esoteric ideas (“Quantum physics and multidimensional chaos”, apparently), but you might not guess that from the way it sounds. Then again, that says something about the record itself.

More on that thought later. Also like Behexen, this is far from a brainless record, even if it is equally far from being an original one. Tempo mixups are important here; La Genèse de Dieu, for example, flicks between a scuzzily hyperactive, slower quasi-thrash groove and more typical roaring. Right after that comes the equally-as-epically-named The Wall of Galaxies, which is a reasonably good attempt at a towering, spacey epic, with its crushingly simplistic riffs played at funereal tempos, and imposing, atmospheric guitar wailing. Despite the almost-proggy approach that is hinted at, this reminds me far more of the horrifying, slow burning epics to be found on By the Blessing of Satan than recent Enslaved or Nacthmystium.

Of course, there comes a point where I have to leave the Behexen comparisons, for there is a little else at work here. At times it has an effect similar to perhaps Diamatregon or even the more conventional moments of Funeral Mist, when the black metal barrage becomes so intense, particularly in the drumming, that it takes on a mechanized feel, like it is the death whirr of a contorted, galactic machine.

And then, as the album enters its latter stages, it becomes more interesting, leaving you with a rather different impression of the album than the one you began with. This is hardly to say that it morphs into jazz-fusion, but the closing four tracks each present new, inventive, spins on the first half’s formula. The Hellraiser-based Four Facets of the Tetragramaton Sinestre, accompanies blood-curdling film samples with a cackling apocalypse of industrial-black blasting. Nullabsolut is a grimly slow, warlike grinder that is rather similar to the experience of severing your ears and leaving them in an abattoir freezer. Erased is based around a disorientating triple-time feel and aggressive dischords. And terrifying closer, Entropy Omega features eerie guitar lines in the background that give a chaotic, sinister character to its howling ghost-train assault.

I don’t know whether it’s just my promo copy that ends bafflingly mid-thought, but it seems appropriate for an album whose cleverness takes you a little by