It’s been five long years since Black Fucking Cancer humiliated the world with their butchering music. The first and only release of theirs for five long years had been their stellar 2011 debut demo Summoning Aural Hell – a release that clearly showcased the band’s unmistakeable prowess, vision, and artistry straight from inception. But since then, the band has laid apparently dormant, playing shows sporadicly and not hinting in any way at any new music. But those days of starving deprivation are over, and the band has now returned with a brand new debut full-length album of absolutely monolithic proportions – a one hour long ass kicking that never relents; a tormented journey into the bleakest and most wretched pits of hell.
If you thought their Summoning Aural Hell demo was awesome, then you won’t fucking believe your ears when this self-titled new monster hits you. BFC’s sound is now taken to its natural extreme consequences thanks to a crisp, huge and raging production not seen previously from the band, and the songwriting has been taken to an extreme in complexity and dynamism that will leave you in complete bewilderment. This is probably BFC’s most distinctive trait: they approach black metal with ambition and a keen eye for complexity, but play it raw and savagely, for a final result that is both grandiose and merciless at the same time. These guys are real masters in taking traditional Scandinavian black metal in the vein of Marduk, Behexen, Gorgoroth, Dark Funeral, Emperor and the such and transfiguring it to a whole new plane of technical artistry, where traditionalism and stylistic pride take unexpected turns and are filled with epic plot twists. You will notice, for example, that the twelve-plus minutes of “Acid Oceans” must surely hold some kind of secret or may contain a “beast within a beast” – and in fact that is exactly what happens here. While the song starts off with a fairly conservative approach, unleashing a lethal firestorm of blast beasts and blasphemous mayhem, it soon turns into a drone-doom behemoth oozing with feedback and noise. An epic end and amazing plot twist in a song that is a triumph in every possible sense and that shows how the band can hop from one genre to the next on a dime and perform any extreme style they please with great command and vision.
This feat repeats in “Sinn Ritual Void,” essentially the inverted version of “Acid Oceans,” where this time the song starts on a slow-motion sludge behemoth-like tread, pounding the listener with a slow moving crawl of putrid sonic death before suddenly rupturing into a maelstrom of swarming black metal chaos around the four minute mark, and not relenting with this senseless sonic fury until the entire ten minutes of the song has obliterated the listener, drained them of all life, and reduced them to complete defencelessness, having pulverized their senses. Equally, the opener “A Sigil of Burning Flesh” and “Blood Stained Whore” show us BFC’s skill in annihilating the listener with lengthy and winding black metal compositions that never relent and slowly entrance the listener with their winding spires of snake-like coiling death. “Wall of Corpses,” on the other hand, is one of the most “straightforward” tracks on the album, but its five and a half minutes of uninterrupted blasphemous savagery are a real plight to pull through as the song pounds your ears with an interrupted assault of blastbeats that is almost impossible to survive. This is where BFC bring to mind more “brutal” modern black metal bands like Behexen, Antaeus, Horna and Archgoat. In other moments, like in the smoldering cacophony of “Exit Wounds” (a track from the demo which, along with “Blood Stained Whore,” the band decided to bring back to life on this album), BFC first slash your ear drums open with a mauling assault of black grinding sonic hatred in the vein of Dodsferd or early Watain and then drag the listener into the pits of hell with a slow, morbid, and decaying funeral dirge of chaotic and noisy blackened doom. The final song, “Communion of the Blood Unholy,” is one of the most “classic” BFC moments, where all of the band’s influences coalesce into a ten minute beast in which new and old collide in a smoldering rainfall of incessant and scathing aural hatred, and then get ripped apart by a meteor shower of blast beats and a chaotic maze of razor wire riffs.
Due to their artistry, skills, and confidence in approaching the old school black metal craft, Black Fucking Cancer seem to eschew obvious definitions due to a superb technicality in their music that creates a strange and seducing duality between modern and old, and the band also obviously could not give two fucks about the current trends in black metal or in extreme music in general. You can clearly tell this by the fact that they have stripped their music entirely of any musicality or melody in favor of a highly punitive, raw, and chaotic approach. Their no fucks given, lurid, and insolent approach at playing black metal in an almost arrogant way is a clear sign that this band likes to do things their own way and lead a life at the border of everything if needed as long as their own vision and creative integrity remain intact. This amazing and punishing debut album of theirs is a real treat for the ears, as it really reminds us what REAL black metal really is, what it should sound like and be about, and how honest, outspoken and real it can feel when played by people who really understand and genuinely love the genre, its origins, and even its most carnal traditionalism.
Black Fucking Cancer‘s self-titled debut album comes with insane artwork by the unholy oil painting master Paolo Girardi, an incredible graphic layout by Kevin Gan Yuen, and was released as CD/Digital/vinyl LP by Graceless Recordings and Osmose Productions, with the CD/Digital version already out, and the vinyl LP version coming shortly after with a release date TBA. A cassette tape was released also by Graceless Recordings.
