Temple of the Maggot – How To Perform A Human Sacrifice

Since digging up this fucked-up two man outfit towards the end of last year, I’ve been waiting impatiently for their debut album to arrive. Entitled “How to perform a human sacrifice – the blood rites”, it is finally here – unleashing with it some highly original and experimental ideas.

As the opening song, ‘Necklace of Teeth’, kicks in it sounds crisp, contemporary and electrified. That would usually be the signal for me to switch off but this is different. Maybe the key is in the arrangement and sound of the guitars that don’t even sound like Black Metal in most places. The vocals blare out straight away, chilling and intense, over the music like an enraged Deadite Hydra bollocking some Minotaurs who’ve just scratched its hell chariot.

Also the subtle use of simple keyboards for emphasis really works and gets you into the music as well as building atmosphere. There’s a pause for breath in the middle, but not for long as the song culminates with the most brutal singing of the word ‘necklace’ you’ll ever hear! Just the idea of a necklace of teeth is brutal enough.

With ‘Leftovers for the God’ there’s  a lot to get your head round. Thundering bass drums, hideous singing, tuneful guitar bridges and a heavy metal style riff. This prepares your mindset as much as is possible for the berserk ‘Feast of Flesh’. The showcase song in my opinion.

The little intro is well fucked up, just 8 seconds of crazed sample straight from a  torture session. Weird as fuck. Then the opening riff is one of those un-metal ones but perfectly complements the real riff that explodes open like a fat sausage bursting on a hotplate, spraying its infected meat all over.

At the song’s core, Temple of the Maggot unleash a stinking miasma of insanity with some fucking bizarre stuff, demonic rasping-breathing, screaming and that disturbing sample of torturous hostility. It ends with Barag’s voice doing a Black Metal vocal cumshot – you’ll see what I mean when you hear it. ‘Pile of Corpses’ is another quality example of TotM’s willingness to explore new depths of experimentation.

Other songs like ‘Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Death’, ‘Bloodbath’ and ‘Boiled Bodies Everywhere’ further the album with the same intoxicating and compelling creation. Employing some tunes that sound more like Rock and Thrash but managing to squeeze them into a cocktail of crazed, wanton hate alongside demented piercing shrieking. Sometimes bordering on industrial, with electronic production and the use of frequent breaks to add massive variation, there is never a dull moment through the whole 38 minutes.

Through their vehement rhetoric, which is featured all over their myspace and on the inlay sleeve, Temple of the Maggot espouse the glorification of all things perverse. It’s done in a way that I think is really funny, although your wives, parents and children will be thoroughly shocked and disgusted by the idea of violent extreme misanthropy.

That’s the way it should be, because music like this is not for the masses but for us few who think for ourselves and can exist outside the parameters of what lesser beings term normality. Even then, this album is like modern art; you either get it or you don’t. I predict Temple of the Maggot will leave their mark, or rather stain, upon the scene for some time to come.

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Tags: 2010, Mongolia, Satan's Millenium Productions, Temple of the Maggot

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 21:45 and is filed under Black Metal Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.