‘Until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.‘
So begins “Every Single Word That Comes Out of Your Filthy Hole is an Infectious Lie Spreading a Disease,” the fifth song on Scottish blackened death metal band Chestcrush‘s second full-length album ΨΥΧΟΒΓΑΛΤΗΣ. If violence isn’t inherently embedded in the greatest opiate of the masses this planet has ever seen, it’s certainly the biggest purveyor of divisiveness and intolerance human beings have ever invented. Chestcrush carry on a decades-long tradition, using the primal energy of bass, guitar, and drums to harken a battering ram of musical physicality to the steeples, mosques, temples, and churches of the world. Where ΨΥΧΟΒΓΑΛΤΗΣ stands out, however, is in its sheer, unadulterated violence. While most bands in the wild spectrum of extreme metal think they’re heavy, Chestcrush might be the only one that actually is. Listening to the trio from Edinburgh channel their inner Satan is like harnessing the power of the Chicxulub asteroid and taking it full on to your, well, chest.
As an unapologetic atheist on my best days (and a weakened agnostic on my worst), there’s a lot to be said, I suppose, for faith. And the irony in this – particularly when looking at the historical spectrum of death and black metal – is that the original Satanic bands like Deicide or Mayhem, and the hundreds that followed them, were, and are, literally grounded in faith. After all, can one believe in the power of Satan without believing in the yin and yang of a god? I’m a firm believer that when I die, my body will rot into Earth’s soil and slowly decompose as I’m attacked by bacteria and all other sorts of microorganisms and simple life alike, and I’ll go back to whatever cycle my atoms care to join. This seems much more enticing then either spending an eternity in heaven with billions upon billions of souls, much less burning in hell with either of them. But the nihilism of Chestcrush goes beyond a belief in the supernatural. The evil spewed from the pulpit goes way beyond a belief system: they are lies perpetuated for millenia. ‘Every single word that comes out of your fucking mouth is a contagious lie, a carrier of disease,‘ spits the band, ‘let the worms feast.‘
The blackened death of Chestcrush sounds as if each song was dragged through the bloody morass of a battlefield, each sonic decision dripping in the blood and viscera of a million bodies sacrificed on the altar of a fictitious godhead. The guitars screech and wail, overlaid and down-tuned, a feeling of exhaustion and heat dripping with each chord. Many songs are punctuated by these evil squalls of distortion that sound like a rusty knife being dragged across the skin of someone’s neck. It’s an unsettling musical experience, and an exhilarating one at that.
Take second song “We Shall Be Devoured By the Offspring of Our Own Flesh,” a sludgy, monolithic slab of darkened metal. Chestcrush manages to take existing genres and just crush them into dense, massive behemoths of steel and blood, a mixture of the visceral and the industrial. It’s in this dark netherworld that music of Chestcrush exists. There’s a tendency to waver between the living and the synthetic, like the cylons of Battlestar Gallactica. The music of “We Shall…” is a mixture of doom and straight-up colossal blast beats. It’s not a soundtrack for the apocalypse, as the apocalypse has been going for at least the better part of the last ten thousand years. It’s a soundtrack for our capacity for hatred and despair, and a terrifying one at that.
“Your Screams Will Echo Long After Your Death” features a foundation of synth-strings buried in the mix and some guttural screams echoing in the crushing three-chord instrumental outro. The song segueways into the doom-ridden, alluvial sludge of Crowbar cover “Existence is Punishment.” The vocals of Topias Jokipii are a painful, throat-ravaging extension of the music the band creates, often vacillating from low-end growls to excruciating shrieks, all buried under inhuman levels of distortion and effects. Sonically the production on ΨΥΧΟΒΓΑΛΤΗΣ is consistently intense and complimentary, in the sense that each of the instruments seem to understand what the other is trying to do. In other words, it’s a well-trained squad of humongous robot killers just ravaging through the crowded streets of a world that’s lost its collective mind.
“Hang Them! Torch Them!” is one of the album’s strongest tracks. There’s a kind of sick sort of playfulness at work, even if it does involve the torturing of an entire species in the eternity of hell. It’s a relentless, unrepentant four minutes of sludge, doom, death metal and blast beats. ‘Hang ’em higher for all to see, light the dark with misanthropy‘ screeches Jokippi. ‘Pave the road with flesh and bones, lead them to the edge of the fall.‘ In this sense, ΨΥΧΟΒΓΑΛΤΗΣ serves as a backdrop for this journey through the mud and muck of bodies that have been sacrificed in the name of false gods, a quest to begin anew at the end of a global-sized genocide. While the album is clearly devoid of hope, “Hang Them! Torch Them!” does imply that there’s no reason why we can’t embrace our inner demons and at least have a little fun while we lay waste to each other.
The blackened death of Chestcrush is extreme metal in its purest form. The band has channeled an entire musical chronology in their modern take on the most nihilistic of genres. There’s an immense focus to the album that has the precise control of a heat-seeking missile, and this gives the heft of the record even more weight. ΨΥΧΟΒΓΑΛΤΗΣ acts as the dense iron core of a planet going to absolute shit, entire populations bowing down to false gods and prophets, be they spiritual or political. Hailing from an island that can trace the bloodied roots of its civilization to the 5th or 6th centuries as Fergus the Great wielded his unprecedented power over the Scottish seaboard, Chestcrush is uniquely poised to screech the tale of a people gone absolutely fucking mad. The album’s title refers to the Greek expression for the extraction of the soul. But in the world of Chestcrush, the souls have long been devoured. There’s nothing left but nine billion meat bipeds, each trying to crawl over the bodies to reach the top, only to be blown away by the bowel-releasing power of ΨΥΧΟΒΓΑΛΤΗΣ.
