An Axis of Perdition - Apertures

Released by: Apocalyptic Witchcraft

Release Date: 13.12.24

Running Time: 45:30

Score: 473,748,891/10

The horror of Christmas is approaching.

Dark Juan is not a fan of this because I hate the fucking commercialisation of it all, and the fact that the businesses seeking to capitalise on a hijacked pagan festival now start filling their odious shelves with stuff at the end of September in the UK and this drives me fucking insane. Christmas stuff is appearing before Halloween stuff in the shops and that is wrong. I despise it because Christmas is supposed to be about family, and celebrating what you have, not shoving as much money as you can down the gullets of ever-avaricious, faceless corporate entities who exploit the workers of less affluent countries, causing yourself debt that takes a year or more to sort out, and basically falling into the trap of commercialism and consumerism, wanting all these things you don’t have for amounts you can’t afford, utilising credit and further enriching those WHO DO NOT GIVE THE SLIGHTEST FUCK ABOUT YOU ALL UNTIL YOU STOP PAYING THEM! Then they are al over you like the cheapest of cheap suits, buttering you up with offers and if you have fallen behind on payments, threatening you with all the legal muscle at their command. It is disgusting. I hate it. Gifts should be carefully chosen things, not just something that little Timmy has seen on an advert and is vastly overpriced for what it is. Already I am trembling with rage, although it should be noted I am generous to my nearest and dearest because they, as people, have immense value to me and I am willing to spend as much as I can afford to enhance their happiness. I will not go anywhere physically to shop apart from for the necessities near Christmas, because the herds of blank-faced, drooling quasi-humans milling around buying absolutely tons of shit they don’t need, food-wise, and will probably throw most of it out just after the holiday make me want to kill them all. The waste is staggering, the waste of oxygen even more so…

I’m sorry if that was not the jocular and avuncular preamble you normally expect. Actually, no I’m fucking not, and part of the reason for this particularly dark opening is because of what is currently playing on the Platter of Splatter ™. Today’s offering is the first album from British Industrial Black Metallers An Axis of Perdition for THIRTEEN years, and to say that it is grim is like saying that I like a drop of booze occasionally.

It should be noted that on “Apertures”, that Michael Blenkarn is responsible for everything you hear as long time band member Brooke Johnson was not available to perform on the album. However, An Axis of Perdition (variously Axis of Perdition and The Axis of Perdition in their past, Mike explaining that the name changes are there to show that the band were different entities and has evolved) carry on regardless, and it is “Apertures” I shall be casting a critical eye over…

The band bill themselves as Industrial Black Metal, and while there are certainly elements of Industrial banging and clanking on there, they are very much not at the forefront of the music, which is really rather experimental Black Metal in the main. The music is dense and waspish, edged and serrated. It sets my imagination off – as I listen, I picture a world under Chaos, no governance beyond who is better armed and most willing to use them. The denizens of this world are short and unfavoured, close-cropped hair framing gaunt faces in which the eyes are fierce and watchful. Hands creep towards the grips of firearms or the hafts of blades as they pass each other on the way to slave in the manufactories for 14 hours, day or night, and there is not enough of anything, apart from ammunition and arms. Filth prevails and clouds of flies and fleas spread unchecked disease and misery, and they rise in vast, uncountable numbers from middens of shit and offal, dumped uncaringly in the middle of dirt streets that turn into noisome quagmires as soon as the acid rain hits. Carcinogen laden smoke belches from the factories churning out weaponry for forces that the people will never see as dissent is dealt with by precision strikes from orbiting “defence” platforms. Even when locked away in their habitation units, the nightmare doesn’t stop. Made out of rusting metal, unheated and uncomfortable with no accoutrements or softness, the workers cower away from draughts and leaking, endlessly dripping, polluted water as they pass the hours with no entertainments or surcease. The noise of clanking tank tracks as militias prowl population centres (you can’t call them cities, because a city implies infrastructure and order), the bark of machine gun fire and the screams of women caught by rape squads are the soundtrack to life here. There is no hope, there is no joy, there is only metal, explosives and flesh, flesh to be expended as the line managers and administrators see fit. There are not hospitals or care systems. Feral children slit the throats of people passing by to rob them of what little they have left, and young girls and boys prostitute themselves in the most perverse fashions just to survive. Adults kill them on sight unless they are using their tortured young flesh and childhood is not a thing any young person here has ever experienced. Most are the product of rape. Women are used in breeding programmes, just wombs to be exploited and keep the workforce numbers up. The children who aren’t guarded and trained in survival by “loving” parents are abducted for use in experiments in extending useful lifespans and cybernetics. Deformity and sickness abound and frequently babies are left to die in the gutters of filth choked streets because they have abnormalities that could be corrected in worlds that are enlightened. There is no hope here, and everything is black suffering and a longed for quick and relatively painless death, either at the hands of someone or an industrial accident.

Shit, that was bleak, but that is what the music of An Axis of Perdition is like. It is cold and dehumanising and hopeless and bleak. It is freezing winds whipping through the rags of people who have nothing and live in crude shelters made of corrugated steel and plastic sheets and tarpaulins next to the exhaust ports of vast munitions factories because that is the only place on this blasted world that has any heat in it and to hell with the chemicals, the carcinogens and the effluvium that belches out of it, dousing these people with metal fragments and radiation and scorching their skin with acidic and alkaline waste that burns and burns until wounds are red raw, oozing and festering…

It appears that the music of An Axis of Perdition has a hold on my imagination that is not loosening its grip. Welcome to the nightmare. An unrelenting barrage of horrendousness and suffering. To think I listened to this for enjoyment!!!

The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System really needs to get out more. It therefore awards An Axis of Perdition 473,748,891/10 because the music turned this review into a tale of horror and hopelessness and any music that is able to charge my imagination to this degree must be fucking good. Merry fucking Christmas, aye?

TRACKLISTING:

Corrupted Pulse

Metempsychosis

The Undercity Awaits

Chant of the Worshipful Prey

Sewer of Lethe

The Truth is There to Tear Apart

Unimaginable Depths

Private Acts of Abnegation

Flesh Underfoot

I am Odium

LINE-UP:

Michael Blenkarn – Everything on this record! Yet another over-talented bastard making me look bad. I’ve had enough of this!

Brooke Johnson – Mike has stated that he didn’t play on this record, but he remains a core of the band.

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