#bestial warlust

[cimmerian-war-shrine]

[asphyxiating-endless-darkness]

Bestial Warlust

Metal for the Brain, Canberra, 1995

photos by Jodi Jerrett/Season Decay Photography

[altar-ov-plagues]

Bestial Warlust

[thelowestorder]

Bestial Warlust - Satanic

[trueblackmetallegion]

[foodblueprint]

Disgorged Goat is going to be there, the band is gonna be there. As well as members of Fleshgod Apocalypse... Bestial Warlust... There's gonna be a bunch of band members there.

[fukkingdeath]

Bestial Warlust - Legion of Wrath

[dustedmagazine]

Invultation — Feral Legions (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

The last time we heard from Invultation, on 2021’s Unconquerable Death, sole member Andrew Lampe was crafting an ill-tempered variety of OSDM, which on occasion verged into more frenetic terrain (check out the convincingly deranged and hugely entertaining “Blood Hex”). In my review of that record, I noted, “The music sounds great…It’s clear that a lot of effort has been expended on making the songs sound resonant and clear.” On Feral Legions, the project’s new LP, Lampe is just as deliberate in his attentions to the music’s sonic qualities, but he has moved its dominant aesthetic in a different direction. This time Invultation has descended deep into the cavernous cacophony of black/death.

The shift in sound is registered early. Following a thunderous-legions-on-the-march-themed introductory track, the record’s first four songs launch precipitously into black/death’s hammering, crunching, high-velocity intensities. Those songs bear the inevitably low-key titles one might expect, like “Severed Umbilical Chaos” and “The Howling Convocation.” And the howling continues: “Lower Beasts,” “The Mark of the Fang” and the title track flesh out the vulpine image on the album art. The music’s general pace slows marginally where those songs cluster, on the record’s second half. But the tone remains true to the attendant symbolics: feral, sharply clawed and full of rage.  

Listeners engaged by the complexities of metal’s many sub-subgenres will know that a particular variety of black/death fashions itself as “war metal,” following the aesthetic trajectory plotted by politically problematic bands like Blasphemy and Bestial Warlust. The werewolf iconography and the martial “legions” Invultation uses on this LP scan unhappily alongside war metal’s nationalist and antisemitic origins. (Ed. note: A spokesman for the band says, "I am 100% antifascist and the werewolf imagery is strictly from a Satanic view.") This reviewer takes consolation from the fact that Sentient Ruin Laboratories does not fuck with fascists (and another Lampe project, The Wakedead Gathering, has released music on I, Voidhanger, another label that’s deliberate about the politics of the artists it works with); one hopes the signs of playing peekaboo with the reactionary sectors of metal is unintentional. Sever the umbilical, move the music forward.

Jonathan Shaw

[cimmerian-war-shrine]

[asphyxiating-endless-darkness]

Bestial Warlust

Metal for the Brain, Canberra, 1995

photos by Jodi Jerrett/Season Decay Photography

[altar-ov-plagues]

Bestial Warlust

[erickleoni]

BESTIAL WARLUST

[necrodeads]

[triste-guillotine]

BESTIAL WARLUST “Satan’s Fist”, Demo 1996 (Holocaustic Barbarian War Metal’ punch in your face from down under’s Hell’s Militia !)

1. Hell's Militia 2. Left for Vultures 3. Satan's Fist

[festering-cadaver]