Tuesday Feb 03, 2015

1,001 Albums: Album 0016: Behemoth - Evangelion

Goooood evening, perverts! Today I’ve got only one album for you in order to keep the album numbers on both lists consistent with each other. Today, we’ve got Behemoth’s “Evangelion.” This is probably one of very few black metal albums that will make it onto my personal list. Why? Because many of the black metal albums I’ve attempted to enjoy sound like each instrument was recorded simultaneously with one cheap Radioshack microphone in a bathroom with all the faders on the mixing board set to the same level (i.e. unity gain, or “0”). These supposedly “mixed” albums sound so abysmal (and not in a good way, the way you’d imagine a black metal album should sound), that I really just can’t deal with them.

The most frustrating thing is… I REALLY WANT TO FUCKING LIKE THEM! Black metal, in my opinion, is intriguing as a genre. Some of the guys write some great lyrics. Not that you’d be able to understand them, since not only are the vocals usually buried like a corpse in the mix (hehe, so “black” of me to put it that way, eh?), but if they manage to rise a little bit above the rest of the instruments, the vocalist sounds something like “ghhhhhhh ughhhhh dhhh fhhh uhhhhh.”

There you are, in the middle of the pentagram you made with pig’s blood in a cemetery, ready to stab a severed goat’s head on the altar your mom bought you for Xmas. Your buddy turns up the volume on the portable radio you brought, and you can’t even understand the fucking words! And you can’t go back home and steal your mom’s Carpenters tapes. Satan doesn’t like The Carpenters… well, maybe he does, actually.

Anyway, yeah, frustrating. This album, however, is not. The vocals still aren’t particularly understandable, but at least you can distinguish between them and the distorted guitars (which are both around the same frequencies in the spectrum of human hearing, by the way). One thing I especially love are the drums. The engineer(s) really did well on the drums. Aside from the album, I love how the singer, Nergal, came out and said he can’t understand how a metal musician or fan can be a Christian. I like some metal bands who’ve identified themselves as Christian, but it’s because their lyrics aren’t dripping with the usual nonsense you’d hear at a Sunday church service. When Dave Mustaine became a born again Christian, I was done with Megadeth. Still am. I can barely listen to their older stuff without being disappointed by remembering what they’re like now.

Anyway, fuck Megadeth, or at least, fuck Dave Mustaine. If you have some time, check out some of Behemoth’s music videos on YouTube. Oh, and especially check out the uncensored video for the single, “Ov Fire And The Void,” where the band tears off the wings of an angel and eats them:

Beautiful. :-)

Here’s the blog I wrote about the album:

http://tinyurl.com/20150203blog

YOOOOOOJNEEEEEE!

01 Behemoth - Daimonos (from Evangelion) [00:00:00]

02 Behemoth - Shemhamforash (from Evangelion) [00:05:13]

03 Behemoth - Ov Fire And The Void (from Evangelion) [00:09:10]

04 Behemoth - Transmigrating Beyond Realms Ov Amenti (from Evangelion) [00:13:37]

05 Behemoth - He Who Breeds Pestilence (from Evangelion) [00:17:02]

06 Behemoth - The Seed Ov I (from Evangelion) [00:22:43]

07 Behemoth - Alas, Lord Is Upon Me (from Evangelion) [00:27:40]

08 Behemoth - Defiling Morality Ov Black God (from Evangelion) [00:30:55]