It all points to a grim experience. TAOS, or The Arrival of Satan to give their Sunday name, have been creating “radical black metal art” since 1999, having first formed to create a self-proclaimed nihilistic soundtrack for the end of the millennium.
The passion for the nihilistic soundtrack remains. “Traitor Brigade”, which opens the album, is as grisly as it gets. Bass heavy, swampy and despairing with infernal drums, it is the darkest of dark experiences and the blackest of black metal in the mould of Gorgoroth. The drum roll and strangulated accompaniment to “Worst is to Come” merely confirms the message of its title. Echoing croakings reinforce the message. The remorseless negativity finds the surface and stays there. The strident rhythm offers no hope. The heaviness, which pours through “Serpent Crawls”, cuts out any light sources. The whole evil output is geared to the eradication of life. Sometimes it’s a straight-line outpouring of nastiness, at other times it’s a slow and drawn out flesh-ripping exercise in the eradication of life. I’m not sure what the asthmatic heavy breathing in the middle of all the dark rumblings were on “Lolita in Furs” but it all sounds pretty dreadful. French black metal can be very evocative, as I learned when listening to the likes of Latrodectus, but this is at the extreme end. “Sterile” gives off the customary foul-smelling stench. Insane cries match the merciless and uncaring guitar ring, as “The Intruder” plumbs the depths. The most bizarre track has to be the title track which concludes the album and thanks to a heavily accented Frenchman leaves us in no doubt that the theme of sodomy has been covered. The drummer batters away, the vocalist utters obscenities and the track has a punk-black metal feel. Unlike the previous tracks which cultivate the bleakest ends of black metal in a similar way, this one has energy. You can even sing along, so long as you don’t mind singing “Sodomy passion … Sodomy you like it”.
“Passion Sodomy Terror” sticks to its pattern and apart from the unique title track, we’re left with a work of largely uniform blackness. But no-one could argue that terror and sodomy haven’t received their fair share of coverage on this album, which may not have the originality but does have the passion.
(7/10 Andrew Doherty)
Leave a Reply