{"id":18269,"date":"2014-02-10T00:00:23","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T00:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/?p=18269"},"modified":"2014-04-09T13:47:04","modified_gmt":"2014-04-09T13:47:04","slug":"ep-review-aragon-antichrist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/ep-review-aragon-antichrist\/","title":{"rendered":"ARAGON – Antichrist EP (2014) | Album \/ EP Reviews @ Metal Forces Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

ARAGON
Antichrist EP<\/strong><\/span>
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\nWerewolf Promotion (2014)<\/span>
Rating: 5\/10<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Clearly drugged up on those old Bathory and Beherit albums, Poland\u2019s old school black metallers Aragon follow on from 2012\u2019s Torn By The Devil<\/em> racket with this unholy batch of tracks. Responsible for those god-awful barks and belches of blasphemy, Daren is joined by Slav, who clatters along with the bass and guitars. The result is a rather messy stab at underground evil that will certainly appeal to those with one foot in the black metal inner circle and another in Satan\u2019s candle-lit inverted pentagram. <\/p>\n

This four-song cassette EP opens with the title track, a horrendous din of a song featuring remote and evil-sounding rasps, and a drum sound first heard on that first self-titled Bathory album all those years ago (1984). Noise to some, but to others \u2018Antichrist\u2019 is a perfect blend of crusty basement metal that goes beyond the usual cold extremes of black metal. <\/p>\n

Although the vocals are unintelligible, I can only guess that such rants are aimed at the church, such is the hell-bent fury. It\u2019s just a shame the production is poor, although this was probably intentional on the part of the duo. Even so, the guitars make for a rather unhealthy cacophony as the bass rumbles with no real effect, the whole thing playing out like an expression of hellish obscurity before the strains of \u2018Souls Condemnation\u2019 come billowing out of the speakers amid plumes of black smoke and burning flesh. It\u2019s a fast track with distant vocal rasps, hyper drums, and the sort of lo-fi guitar sound which reeks of the obscure but also the downgraded.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the four songs on this EP are quite long \u2013 too long in fact, with \u2018Separate This World\u2019 clocking in at over six minutes. Again, the track has a \u201clive from the cellar of doom\u201d feel to it with the down-tuned distant guitars and vocals, which reverberate off the dank walls amid the messy barrage of drums. Aragon are clearly impure souls only interested in creating raw, primitive music for those with a fetish for such horror. <\/p>\n

An impure guttural tumult seemingly bereft of professionalism or tune, the closing \u2018Suicide For All\u2019 runs for a negative seven-or-so minutes. The drums continuously rattle away like a pneumatic drill, occasionally giving way to the migraine-inducing vocal vomits and dissonant guitar.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to decide whether this is a truly unholy clamour or merely an uproar that deserves little or no attention, but whatever your opinion, Aragon have a sound that appears as though it\u2019s been around longer than when hell\u2019s caves were carved out. It\u2019ll take a brave man to ignore a din so brain-numbing, and I\u2019m sure that if Lucifer did want to create a bitchin\u2019 band then the members of Aragon might be selected as his backing band.<\/p>\n

Neil Arnold<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ARAGONAntichrist EP Werewolf Promotion (2014)Rating: 5\/10 Clearly drugged up on those old Bathory and Beherit albums, Poland\u2019s old school black metallers Aragon follow on from 2012\u2019s Torn By The Devil racket with this unholy batch of tracks. Responsible for those god-awful barks and belches of blasphemy, Daren is joined by Slav, who clatters along with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,1160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-album-ep-reviews","category-aragon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18269"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18321,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18269\/revisions\/18321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metalforcesmagazine.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}