Imagine a half-drunken jam session between Mille Petrozza, Fenriz and Tom G. Warrior, the lot of them caught between ripping through varying combinations of their distinctive thrash, black and proto-black heaviness and just rocking out on Motorhead-meets-Venom sloppy rock.
Don’t act like that doesn’t sound like fun.
And it kind of is, and though it regrettably actually involves exactly none of the players I name-checked, The Seth Avalanche certainly sounds like the scene I just described.
At heart, this six-song EP is a thrash effort, but it’s one that runs headlong and happily into black metal, and it’s one that sports a noticeable rock influence, particularly in the jaunty bounce and greasy-grimy guitar licks of “Eating The Maneater” and album opener “Fuckslut From Hell.” “Blunt Force To The Head” starts on a slow, simple chug before stepping into some blastbeats and a full-out thrashing ending, and “Not Quite What I Had In Mind” reverses that, starting out blasting and dropping into a swinging mid-section that is guaranteed to get toes a-tappin’, touching on a killer sliding riff and moving past without further ado. On each of these tunes, vocalist Nils Meseke shrieks and growls like a demented Petrozza, his performance dramatic, borderline unhinged, as engagingly silly as it is spitting and aggressive.
While The Seth Avalanche is an entertaining endeavor based on quality thrashing blackness alone, it achieves a next-level ridiculous uber-metal-ness (and metallic uber-ridiculousness) by way of its lyrics, which are equal parts comical and disturbing and oddly endearing in their over-the-top attempts to shock. “Fuckslut From Hell” speaks for itself, and the title track lives up to its blackness – it’s the most stereotypically black metal lyric on hand, a sociopolitical middle-finger-raised take on the forthcoming end of the world: “Where’s your God now / at the dawn of the age of Seth?” “Eating The Maneater” begins with a verse about a man stalking, killing and eating a Bengal tiger – this man is clearly crazier and / or hungrier than I have ever been – but then it takes the titular character in a direction all Hall & Oates, juxtaposing the tiger against a woman in a bar, here both predator and prey. Hearing Meseke screech “Back home I’ve got a freezer full of women just like you / I’m eating the maneater!” is one of the EP’s most head-banging / head-shaking moments, and the couplet of “Cause when you spread you become my favorite dish / who’s wrapped around whose finger now as I go to the land of fish” is equally poetic. Still, the highest and lowest praise must go to “Not Quite What I Had In Mind,” which details in no uncertain terms the protagonist’s taunting of his enemies, who then beat him to a pulp, break his legs and teeth, tie him to a chair and brutally sodomize him repeatedly, which (you guessed it) was not what he had in mind.
As noted elsewhere in other reviews, black / thrash is quite the rage these days, with some great recent efforts by Aura Noir, Mongrel’s Cross, and the like. Septekh isn’t as sharp or as raging as those, not quite in that league of giants, but The Seth Avalanche still exhibits a winning combination of the vicious and the ludicrous, and it’s certainly skilled enough to make for an enjoyable burst of rocking blackness.
