Originally written by K. Scott Ross.
Sometimes you can judge an album pretty accurately at a single glance. For example, if your band is called Goatbush and your album is called We Are the Goat Rapers and the cover art is a black and white sketch of some angel gettin’ it in the butt from a goat-headed demon with a three-foot dong, then you’re probably playing war metal and I already know what it’s going to sound like. I thought that Amok’s Necrospiritual Deathcore was that kind of album. Sometimes it feels good to be wrong.
Going in, I knew nothing about Amok or their album. I’ll grant that the cover for Necrospirtual Deathcore isn’t quite as over the top as the one I described — for one thing it’s yellow and black, instead of black and white — but it’s at least enough to get you in that wheelhouse. And the first track is called “Necropsy Cunt.” Sounds like typical war metal, right? And indeed “Necropsy Cunt” is a filthy slab of lo-fi crunchy guitars and d-beats. The song calls to mind the early days of Sarcofago and I assumed the band was from somewhere in South America, perhaps Argentina or Peru (more on that later).
Then, after an audio sample from famous cult leader Jim Jones, “Geitehelvete” kicks in. What a change! This song is only two minutes long, but it cracks like an electrified strand of razor wire. The guitars oscilate chromatically while a blast beat carries the barky, phlegm-y vocals. The sound develops again with “Channelling Black Horns,” going back a bit to the raw proto-black Sargofago sound, but not quite as primitive this time. The tempos are up, and the band incorporates a lot of electronic noise to dirty the track.
Amok continues this trend for the next few tracks. It’s like listening to the band develop a style in real time. The audio samples from the Jonestown massacre are placed between the tracks like a grim narration for the album. The vocals grow more gutteral, the guitars get chunkier, and drums tighten up. When we enter into the second half of the album with “Providentialism,” I’m completely sold. A rollicking, banging black metal riff is interspersed with a funeral dirge march. The vocals shout “Praise the Lord! Kill yourself!” The final sample from Jones calling for his followers to drink the poison is utterly chilling.
Amok then provides us with an instrumental interlude, something that I have derided in the past as usually a useless gesture done to pad albums or out of mistaken nostalgia. Here, it works perfectly, particularly as a transition into the “Goatflesh Removal” triptych. The sound of the band has become something completely different. The raw war metal sounds are gone, replaced by thin tremolo lines and keyboard atmosphere. In “Corpus Christi,” voices shout out the definition of a cult. At about 2:45, they reach the line “No way out; there is never a legitimate reason for leaving.” This phrase is repeated until the end of the song. Such an approach could be cheesy. Instead, it feels genuinely hopeless.
“Memento Mori” takes things to a more melancholy place, with a three-note syncopated arpeggio while the same spoken voices shout a nihilistic passage. Using these spoken vocals instead of the gutturals employed earlier in the album makes the message feel more urgent. When the harsh vocals return on “Gloria In Excelsis Deo” (saying just that while backed by monastic chant), it’s a final seal on the horror that’s been slowly accumulated over the album’s short running time.
Thus with religion.
It turns out that Amok is actually from Norway, and Necrospiritual Deathcore was actually originally released in 2006. The guitarist was a guy named Goatpromoter Lava, which is certainly a stage name. The vocalist was Necrocum, and the bassist Iscariah. The drummer was just a dude named Stanley. Actually, Stanley was the drummer for the first half of the album. The drummer on the “Goatflesh Removal” trio was Hoest, of Taake fame. Now the band is gone, though.
Personally, I don’t usually bother with reissues, particularly limited-run vinyls like this one. There’s so much music coming out these days that if I don’t already know the album being reissued, I’ll usually let it pass by. That would have been a mistake here. This little album is one of the most effective musical strikes against organized religion I’ve had the pleasure of hearing. Most of us missed out on Amok’s Necrospiritual Deathcore the first time around. Don’t make the same mistake twice. The album is available digitally online, and if you can snag one of the limited-run vinyls, it will certainly be a fine addition to any black metal collection.
