The King of Snakes

Ride for Revenge ("RfR") is a Finnish band that mixes black metal and doom metal to become something almost entirely different from either subgenre. Similar to Barathrum's earliest releases, RfR de-emphasizes guitars for a bass-and-drums aesthetic with varying degrees of noise and power electronics influences. They're one of the most unique contemporary black metal bands, and with a surprisingly diverse run of albums.

The King of Snakes is a weird LP even considering the band's weirdness. The entire album is exclusively bass guitar and drums with occasional electronic flourishes - including the creepiest use of theremin since Captain Beefheart's "Electricity". The choice adjective is "ritualistic", which you'll probably come across in any discussion of the band. And for good reason: each track on The King of Snakes progresses as an extremely understated pace, where percussion take on almost martial undertones as opposed to blast beats or anything even approaching moderate tempos.

This slowness is majorly to the band's benefit. Later albums would incorporate faster influences, including straight-up Norwegian black metal on Thy Horrendous Yearning and rockier elements on Under the Eye and Ageless Powers Arise. While all three of these albums have their appeal, The King of Snakes is very unique in the entire 34 minutes having that steady dread with no major moments of speed. The power is in the lethargy - the creepy, creepy lethargy.

In contrast to the low fidelity of later albums (especially follow-up Wisdom of the Few), The King of Snakes goes hard on the bass but without much distortion. The very first track suitably sets the tone with an immediate punch of rhythmic, overblown bass guitar that goes straight for the gut. The vocalist half speaks, half chants the lyrics, meandering through basslines and snare hits. The whole album is completely bare bones, and nowhere are the noise experiments that appear on Wisdom of the Few, Under the Eye, and Sinking the Song. But again, that's not a bad thing: the mutedness is to its benefit, making "Commands from the Antichrist" and "Erotic Needs in the Emotional Void" all the more ominous.

The King of Snakes is a sodden black metal album. It's the sonic equivalent of pulling apart wet tissue paper found in a gutter. Let the bass suck you in its murk - and then check out the other LPs too!

Appropriately for an album called "The King of Snakes", the impression you come away with after hearing this recording all the way through is of a sinister reptilian entity that slinks unseen in the dark undergrowth, its true form unknown to humans, and which strikes you with cold and unerring accuracy. The poison spreads quickly and quietly through your blood, your body temperature plummets just as fast and as you slip into unconsciousness with not a sneeze or a yelp to let others know something is wrong with you, you feel just that slight twinge of derangement as the venom slides right into your brain. Yes, this si a deep cold-blooded black metal record with a slippery clean feel, very no-nonsense and efficient in the way it delivers its velvet-glove punches with the minimum of fuss and fanfare. The immediate comparison is with another Finnish (former) BM band Beherit's album "Drawing down the Moon" which has a similar smooth and even elegant feel and dark and sinister tone. Both albums happen to be fairly short, each having a total running time of under 40 minutes, with songs that have a fairly minimal and straightforward structure.

In Ride for Revenge's case, that minimal song structure might be because the band's style revolves around bass guitar and drums resulting in music that is deep and strongly rhythmic, and sounding more death metal than black metal. The songs aren't especially fast and the pace can be quite leisurely on occasions though most of the time the music moves at a steady clip. The drumming on nearly all tracks is tribalistic in an insistent way especially on tracks like "Death of the Feeble Masses" (which is very strongly reminiscent of the previously mentioned Beherit album) and may very well be intended to have a hypnotic trance-like effect. Vocals are clear with a rough gurgle at the deep end and a reverb effect that makes them alien and malevolent. The production is airy in a cold way and creates a spacious atmosphere (and not having any blurry rhythm guitars helps). Keyboards are used sparingly to create creepy spacey effects and to give the album a demented air so the music feels as though it's a tight lid pressed over a hole in which a mad suppressed fury is fighting to get out.

The passion level is even throughout the album so there are no emotional highs and lows that would hook listeners and it's possible some people will be put off by the cold alienating ambience of the recording. The lyrics are at odds with the music, dealing as they do with perverse desire and lust. If I had to nominate the best track here - they are all good and are more or less on an even keel in technical execution and dramatic feel - I'd pick out the outro track "Erotic Needs in Emotional Void" due to its incredibly spine-chilling keyboard melody used in its introduction. There is supposed to be a theremin being played in this track (maybe that's the thing responsible for the strange tune) but I swear I hear it more on a previous song "We Rise Above". For those people who don't know what a theremin is, it's an electronic instrument that was invented in the early twentieth century by a Russian guy with a very eerie wavy sound and it was much used in soundtracks for 1950's B-grade science fiction movies in Hollywood and occasionally by the US surf pop band The Beach Boys in the 1960's, the typical example being "Good Vibrations".

If you already like the early Beherit recordings, you may like to investigate this recording. Ride for Revenge have opted to create a low-key, no-fuss straightforward minimalist style of rhythmic black / death metal music with plenty of strange and sinister atmosphere that promises more of the little murk it reveals to us. There can be problems with this stripped-down approach especially for a band that relies solely on bass and drums - the lack of rhythm guitars means that the band cannot openly summon up aggression and hatred so if you are expecting a record to thrill to as an outlet for hostility, this is not the record for you - but "The King of Snakes" is effective in its own way as an especially dark and sinister Satanic BM recording.