vote
7.5
- Band:
To hominem - Duration: 00:31:19
- Available from: 28/02/2025
- Label:
-
Osmose Productions
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After more than twenty-five years of activity, the seventh seal of the One-Man Band Black Metal Band arrives in Hominem, obviously personified by the handyman Kaiser Wodhanaz, with a title that is, and wants to be, a real manifesto: “Totalitarian Black Metal”.
The ad Hominem, in fact, over the years have been able to be recognized and many have started to appreciate them for their direct and uncompromising style. First we can immediately cheer the fans of the group, saying that fortunately there are no stylistic surprises on this new job. What surprises is the power of production, capable of exalting it in an exaggerated way and of placing it by right between the most extreme and most interesting outputs in the black metal field of this 2025; Fans will determine whether even the contents, in addition to the killer production, are such as to consecrate this album as the best product that came out of the Ad Hominem.
After a short intro that has only the purpose of preparing us psychologically to the imminent wave of violence that will overwhelm us, the fist in the face entitled “Gas Mask Devastation” arrives: this song is made up of a linear riff but capable of draging behind the rhythm, and then being replaced by a midtempo supported by a rhythmic base in the foreground, on which a simple black metal reason to make the entire piece is enough.
It is a bit all the work, in fact, to stand on a few ideas but well made, on songs with a narrow minutage and an intense sound wall fed by hatred and destruction. Already starting from the titles of the songs, which some can remember a bit those used by groups such as Sodom, Impled Nazarene and Carpathian Forest, exudes the sockish nihilism that animates Kaiser Wodhanaz, a French artist who now lives in Piedmont. As in the past, some time also persist on the new album some black metal influences of groups such as Marduk, but more persistently different influences refer in general to thrash metal and black'n'roll and enrich the raw and brutal style of the ad hominem.
After the title-track, an anthem of violence in itself, one of the pieces imbued by the stylistic influences appointed above (Carpathian Forest included), or “Choke the Woke”, arrives. The result here is really excellent, and the song is one of the best of the entire release. Immediately afterwards you fall into the nuclear nightmare of “The Nuclear Solution”, another deadly song in which on a swirling rhythm they come to intermittence dissonants that have the effect of the sirens that promise total disaster.
To hear the first vaguely melodic riff, you have to get to the final “Dekontamination” and this speaks volumes about the rigorous intransigence of this product, but one of the secrets of this full-length is also the short and concentrated duration of its songs and its narrow (perhaps even too much) overall duration.
Never as in “Totalitarian Black Metal” to such proclamations of destruction of everything around the band has followed such a concrete sound response and daughter of the same hatred. Probably not everyone the black metal played and conceived in this way is the most congenial among all the existing ones, but it should be acknowledged to Hominem that they have managed to make a sound bomb with the highest potential.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
