Megiddo: The Devil and The Whore Album Review

Here we go with another black metal review. On-line, overwhelmingly the blogs I write that get the most hits are either horror film reviews or metal reviews. The audience for the horror film and metal reviews overlaps strongly with an audience of people that are strongly involved with the visual arts, especially after I started working with the Jerry Magoo blog, but it's still really those two topics that overwhelmingly grab the most attention. It's not necessarily the material that I care the most about, but I am more then willing to try and meet with my audience halfway. As such, I will discuss here the Canadian black metal band Megiddo, Not to be confused with the old Celtic Frost track "Dawn of Megiddo". Canada has provided us with a fair few good metal bands. I remain a devote Voivod fan after years and years. Cryptopsy is fair. I've been a fan of Akitsa since I first heard them on the Primitive North america compilation in 2009. I've been recommended Megiddo as being a band to check out if I like Akitsa, although Megiddo are from Ontario unlike the other bands, who are from Quebec where metal seems to have had a large following. I don't like paying for music, so it is for me to happily inform you that there 2000 album Megiddo is available in it's entirety on youtube if you look around. The comparison with Akitsa is valid. Both play a kind of primitive black metal recorded on low-fi. I wouldn't say that Megiddo is nearly as musically adventurous as some of the Akitsa I've heard. I will try to avoid using the vague and over-used term "experimental" because black metal itself constitutes such a cultural margin aesthetically, but Akitsa are very distinctive sounding. I've read Akitsa go as far as to cite Throbbing Gristle as an influence, they broke a lot more boundaries of genre definition then Megiddo did. I know that I've been insulting Genesis P. Orridge on here a lot but it is worth stating that in Throbbing Gristle, Genesis was one band mate out of four. Megiddo were much more of a straight ahead black metal band from what I've heard. The intro to "Across the Shores/Four Sons" is a little slower and sounds somewhat like a goth band, and there's a three minute noise track at the end, but The Devil and The Whore is almost entirely hard, nasty black metal. The lyrics are typically obsessed with standard black metal themes of annihilation, death, and Satan. "i will laugh at the death of your children" is a particularly choice lyric. They throw in two covers towards the end of the album, "Violence and Force" by Exciter and take this torch by Razor. It's an okay album. I'm not sure I'd rank it as highly as Voivod's War and Pain or Akitsa's excellent work, but for free it is well worth a listen.