GRIMLAIR, Au Commencement De L’Ombre (2009, Self Mutilation Services)

The skull:
This faded, ghoulish fellow looks at first glance to be wearing some kind of hood or cowl, but in fact it’s a mortarboard, worn insouciantly far back on his dome. If that doesn’t make any sense, perhaps you didn’t realize that the proper English title of this release should be “At the Commencement of the Hombre,” but due to some confusion as to how to operate Google Translate, it came out (in French) as The Beginning of Shadow. It’s a mistake anyone could have made.

The music:
You’d never guess that this is one-man bedroom black metal, would you? Oh, you would? What gave it away? Oh, right. Everything. This is raw and awful, but I think it’s supposed to sound raw and awful. It’s not that Cadavre (the one-man) is totally incompetent, it’s just that he loves terrible music, and is very good at recreating the shit he likes. I’ll give him a couple extra points, even, for playing real drums, even if it kinda sounds like he’s playing them at the same time as the guitars, the way it used to work in one-man bands. Anyway, if you like shitty, sloppy, drenched-in-verb black metal, then maybe you’ll like this. I mean, who knows? People with rotten taste are hard to predict.
— Friar Johnsen