Von: Satanic Blood

I confess that I am not a big fan of black metal. Yes, I've heard songs that I like--quite a few, in fact--but I can't say I like the constant posturing and pretensions to evil. I recently watched a hilarious video on Youtube, taken from The Today Show, in which a woman professes to have a toaster possessed by Satan. When asked why she's kept the toaster all this time, the woman states simply, "it makes really good toast." If that isn't funny enough, one of the slices of toast, mostly burned, purportedly came out with the words "Satan lives" carved into it. If a toaster cares enough about Satan to warn users of his presence, then I guess black metal has little more to offer. And yet, black metal continues to insist on its hatred of Christianity and its embrace of satanic forces. It troubled the evangelicals back in the 80s and it continues to bother people to this day. As for me, I see most of the song titles and the lyrics (always about various inchoate rituals) as metaphors of frustration with an increasingly strange world. Everybody, it seems, embraces evil to upset the middle-class, a point that Baudelaire understood all too well a hundred years ago.

As we delve into the album, fans will notice that there are a lot of familiar looking song titles on here. There's a reason for that--the tracks on this release are actually made up of three 7" releases from a few years ago. The song titles are the usual fare, basically combinations of words drawn from Christian and pagan images or ideas. The result, I suppose, is a rather humorless insistence on the reality of evil and its place in the modern world. I'm not necessarily shocked by any of this, mostly because I remember the media frenzy of Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast." The problem is that people mean various things by all this imagery and that it's hard to recognize irony when it isn't self-evident. As for me, I've never been particularly fond of Von, even though I recognize that many people appreciate them because of their place as one of the very first American black metal bands. More importantly, their influence on other black metal bands is strong enough to earn them a solid place in metal history.

As I listened to this release, I did so from the point of view of someone coming to Von for the first time. I realize that I can't exactly forget about the historical importance of this band, but I have to say that I found this album to be rather tough going from beginning to end. The vocals are overly harsh and inaccessible and the articulation of the words nearly impossible to understand. I also found the constant repetitiveness of the guitars to be monotonous, uninspired, and dull. The lyrics, which show up on my Ipod somehow, are all about various rituals of sacrifice. Moreover, the songs, too, are indistinguishable one from another. Some readers will like this release for its broader importance to the music; others will like it for the music; still others will see it as a rather small offering, one lacking in heart, soul, and, perhaps, music. I'll take the toaster.

Track Listing:
1. Jesus Stain
2. Devil Pig
3. Venien
4. Release
5. Veadtuck
6. Vennt
7. Evisc
8. Goat Christ
9. Dissection Inhuman
10. Chalice of Blood
11. Blood Von
12. Christ Fire
13. Backskin
14. Watain
15. Blood Angel
16. Lamb
17. Satanic Blood
18. Satan
19. Litanies of Von

Added: November 14th 2012
Reviewer: Carl Sederholm
Score:
Related Link: Band Label Page
Hits: 1773
Language: english

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