Boiled in Goat Blood

Every once in a while, you end up encountering music that leaves you bewildered and scratching your head, making you think “What was the thought process here?”. It’s not something you encounter in metal music often these days, since most subgenres, even on the avant-garde ends of the spectrum have been established to the point where there’s cliches in being experimental. rehtaF ruO, with their goofy name and their album, Boiled in Goat Blood have managed to stump me in a way I haven’t felt since my high-school, pimple-ridden self listened to Death Grips for the first time.

I’m gonna get one thing straight right off the bat. This album is incoherent, full stop. If you go into this expecting to hear anything resembling a well-structured song you’re going to walk off disappointed. Boiled in Goat Blood leaps around from hyper blasted tremolo segments to droning ambience at the drop of a hat, and there’s no rhyme or reason to these transitions. Take for example the track “Churchburner”. It starts off with a rather death metal-influenced riff that gets the blood pumping, but then out of nowhere it jumps into this bizarro blast beat that’s so absurdly fast and loud I’m almost convinced it came from a drum machine, all while there’s still something resembling an actual drumset underneath it all. Eventually it ends with the most random cymbal splashes I’ve heard in my life, as if you just let someone who didn’t know that music was being recorded hit them a few times at random intervals. That’s how the entire album flows. Things make sense one moment and the next you get a proverbial slap to the face that might as well be literal with how out of left field it is.

Yet despite how nonsensical the album is on a musical level, I find myself inexplicably drawn to it. The chaos and rawness give it a charm that I can only imagine is what people who have 30-40 years on me felt when they got their hands on first wave black metal records and demos. It takes a certain kind of mind to throw a drum machine’s hyperblast over a normal paced beat like on “Cold Black Blood Occultism”, and Urobach’s mind is just that. I don’t know how he did it but he managed to make what is at its core a wall of noise memorable despite being deathly allergic to anything resembling a hook, with one exception. “Child Sacrifice” has what is arguably the only coherent and “normal” riff on the album, a brooding doodle that ironically enough feels out of place when you look at how the band has been operating up to that point. Worry not though, things go back to incoherent growled blasting just as abruptly, and I’m all for it.

Boiled in Goat Blood also features one of the few instances where I actually don’t mind ambience. More often than not it feels like bands just put weird intermezzos in their music for the hell of it, but here it just feels right. The whole thing is just a jumbled collage of sounds that range from black metal chaos to ambient drones, and having “The Depths of Hell” right at the end just, works. Because what could possibly make any more (or less, depending on your view) sense for an album like this than for it to end with a 10-minute long haunting ambient epic? I kid you not, this is actually one of my favourite moments here because of how subdued and forlorn it is compared to what came before, and even then it’s seemingly improvised, with some random piano notes on the third half, along with Urobach’s choked rasps.

Even the production has left me absolutely baffled with how it sounds, and is frankly, a total clusterfuck. The guitars’ buzz is relatively flaccid and fluctuates in volume, more often than not getting overpowered by the dingy drums, the cymbals of which I’m wondering if they were even used barring a few moments, because if they were, I barely heard them. The vocals were the only part of the music that was audible at all times, with Urobach’s distorted, garbled rasp and growls being audible whenever they appeared, even if they were incoherent.

Truthfully, Boiled in Goat Blood is a mess, kinda like this review. It’s a release that bucks anything resembling musicality and instead of merely throwing shit at the wall and waiting to see what sticks it breaks the whole thing down. Yet, I can’t help but be charmed and attracted by how much of an imperfect anomaly it is. Urobach and Angelblood Baptizer managed to create something that, paradoxically, is coherent in its incoherence. They somehow managed to create something that feels like the metal equivalent to free jazz with how everything jumps around from one moment to the next. rehtaF ruO is definitely not for everyone, but I’d still argue it’s essential listening, despite the fact that it doesn’t fit into what one might consider “good”. It’s unique, and sometimes that’s all you need from music.

Highlights: Churchburner, Child Sacrifice, The Depths of Hell

You'd be hard put to find a more fruitcake and utterly filthy black metal album than this self-released number by the reverse-monickered rehtaF ruO. This is a very inspired record that could be a soundtrack to some demented underground horror flick, track titles like "Child Sacrifice", "Satanic Torture", "Ritualistic Evil" and "Frozen Shade" among others looking like chapter titles out of an "Exorcist" clone trash novel soon to be made into a B-grade flick starring the ever-typecast Linda Blair as the harassed mother or grandmother of the child victim. Cheap and crappy machine-gun beats (yeah, the famous samples of a hammer, all sped up to an insane velocity) do battle with chessy-sounding noisy fuzz guitar, various electronic and keyboard effects and slurpy reptile vokillz slopping out lurid purple lyrics. Parts of this recording sound deliberately lo-fi as though recorded with junk instruments and equipment in some shitty studio located in an underground dungeon beneath an abandoned and haunted church or monastery, other parts which frequently run together with the lo-fit bits sound amazingly clear and crisp, the overall effect of mixing the bad quality and the good quality recordings being to a create a seesawing, nauseous atmosphere of Hell. Sometimes it's the guitars that sound good and the drumming that sounds bad and other times it's the other way round so listeners are always kept offside and disoriented.

It's difficult to distinguish definite individual tracks because the musicians don't use conventional music structures so there are no clear guitar riffs and melodies that would guide you and the rhythms seem all very chopped up. Most tracks are quite short (no more than 3 - 4 minutes in length) which only serves to maintain the confusion level. So many weird things are going on that for once I'm convinced the musicians really did sell their souls to their namesake. Best then to try listening to the album as a whole work with different movements but I'll mention some tracks that I think are worthy. Insane and out-of-control industrial rhythms and drumming "Cold Black Blood Occultism" which like most tracks also features multiple demon voices. In "Child Sacrifice" we get a deranged rhythm and loads of tom-tom bashing plus a very strange flowing guitar looping sequence. "Pure Unholy Death" features a creepy and cheesy church organ intro, lots of guitar fuzz-n-buzz, deranged machine beats, evil shrieking baby voices (I just love those!!!) and other noisy elements all churning in a huge steel vat.

The last track is "The Depths of Hell" which is the only "natural" track in that it is more or less improvised without any stitches of splicing showing as in the other collage-like tracks, and which resembles the kind of rambling nature walk through Hell that the Swedish experimental improv black metal duo Abruptum used to be so fond of. If you harboured any hopes that rehtaF ruO might still retain some rationality or common sense, throw those away now because this is where the musicians are in their natural 100% bonkers element: banging and scraping metal rhythms abound, the cavernous dark space is punctuated with bits of piano melody, plaintive synth tones and monster noises and snuffling, and the atmosphere is really heavy with the fetor of evil death. There is no resolution or climax on this track so you have to assume at the end that the guys are still lost in Hell and eventually they'll find their way out with enough stories of what they got up to for a follow-up album.

Definitely not an album for the faint-hearted or those expecting proper music as most tracks are short and not very structured, and so listeners may be confused as to what "Boiled ..." is supposed to be, a concept album or an album of not-very-individual songs. The sound is often tinny and can lurch straight into near-death metal upfront brutality only to go into something kitsch and cheesy, as though the musicians enjoy toying with people's expectations of what Satanic black metal should be like. So this is not a very consistent-sounding work and the experimentation can be chaotic. The risk that things don't happen the way the musicians intend them to can be high with this kind of experimental music. I think you will get more out of "Boiled ..." if you don't take it too seriously (of course whether Satan will take it seriously and maybe punish rehtaF ruO with unspeakable tortures is another matter) and accept the sillier elements as embellishments to an already lunatic and depraved recording.

It is difficult to imagine that of all the contenders for the dubious distinction of "Worst Album of All Time," the clear favorite would be from a Nordic black metal outfit. Unfortunately, Rehtaf Ruo has done the previously unimaginable and given us an offering of such horrendous execution (never mind the actual concept) that they are in real danger of claiming a spot on the Wall of Shame right next to the MC5.

If "Boiled in Goat Blood" were not such a terrible album, one might actually be inclined to take Rehtaf Ruo seriously, despite the Captain Obvious nature of the name they took. The album is replete with occultist imagery that doesn't simply rely on bludgeoning the listener with too-vivid descriptions of the horrors they would inflict upon the holy. Instead, drummer/vocalist/instigator Urobach gladly relies on not-vivid-enough lyrics that might constitute odes to the Dark Side of Something-or-Other if they actually made an ounce of sense or possessed even a trace of imagination. Perhaps not surprisingly, he fails miserably on both counts.

Fortunately for him, the lyrics are hardly worthy of the listener's concern once the album actually begins to play. "Boiled in Goat Blood" is an unintelligible mess, thanks to the worst production ever to be inflicted in someone's garage and the worst musical ideas ever to inflict themselves on an unsuspecting world. It is indeed true that the drums were recorded by battering them with a hammer, but the instant he dreamed it up should have been one of those stop-and-think moments, at which point Urobach would have realized just how idiotic such a thought was and would have discounted it immediately. Unfortunately, the subsequent cacophonous din raised by his antics may actually prove that such an expectation would be giving him too much credit and paying too much respect to whatever musical credentials he may have once possessed (theoretically).

Bjorn Haga is listed in the band credits as the guitarist, but actually listening to the album constitutes little proof that guitars were used anywhere during the recording. Certainly, now and again a tantalizing chord appears, barely audible in the mix, but if Haga truly did more than that, it's hardly noticeable unless the listener is straining to pick out his lurching riffs as his fingers stumble across the fretboard like a drunken sailor fresh from shore leave.

If one can manage to sit through the album several times without driving a rusty icepick into their eardrums, he will be rewarded with an experience that must surely have been plucked straight from the bowels of Hell: Urobach's vocals. More than the production, more than the mix volume, more than the god-awful drumming and sputtering guitars, Urobach's nauseating vocals sink the album from merely "terrible" to "really ****ing ****ty" from the moment he opens his mouth. While some have always argued that the typical black metal vocalist's yowls, shrieks, or screeches are simply indecipherable, Urobach takes the worst aspects of black and death and combines them into a fetid morass, the aural stench of which has a reach of miles. Instead of merely making a poor attempt at copying Ihsahn's shriek or Attila Csihar's howl, Urobach makes the one of the worst moves in history (rivaling invading Russia in the dead of winter in sheer stupidity) and develops his own vocal style: "the puke."

Indeed, Urobach vomits his merry way through the album, thoroughly enjoying his newfound power to truly drive the point of his lyrics home--incompetence is born of hellfire and a single microphone hanging from the rafters of his father's attic.

"Boiled in Goat Blood" is an unmitigated disaster in every aspect. Completely devoid of any charm, intelligence, or redeeming factor, this is one album that budding musicians everywhere would do well to hear at least once, if only so they can get a clear idea of the mistakes they should NEVER make.