Fuck Peace! We're at War!

Fantastic! So Moonblood have decided to move down along the anti-commercial black metal lane and record yet another split tape, this time with Brazilian war gods, Evil. Now some bands featured on raw/epic/whatever black metal split tapes really supplement each other, creating a really nice contrast and /or theme. We have the "Légions noires" from France with killer artists such as Vlad Tepes and their split with Belketre or even Germany's Moonblood split tape with the French Deathspell Omega. Now these tapes are of the better splits out there. Most of the split tapes are just plain bad. Not only the recordings differ from each other: one being worse that the other and it sometimes seem that the bands hold a certain competition to seeing who can record the shittiest quality on their side of the tape. The Moonblood/Evil split tape is such a phenomenon.

Sometimes I do not really know wether to be completely awed by the "evil" on these tapes, causing me to run like a little child who pissed his pants because he had seen the boogie man (or at least the sonic version of him), or to just simply shake and sink my head to the utter ridiculous "effort" of really really evil and raw black metal. There is a point in music (and this tape surely bypasses it) where the quality of the recording is so incredibly bad and fuzzy, that one can not impossibly enjoy such cacophonies. Speaker buzzing and out of time played riffs are only the tip of the iceberg. Imagine a huge inflatable boat with a hole in it and Vrangsinn from Carpathian Forest on top, slowly deflating, while the penetrating sound of the air straming out hisses into your ear. That's the background sound on this tape. The guitar tune is so poor, that it doesn't sound like distortion anymore, but rather like someone humming in the background. Bass is naturally completely out of concept. For the vocal part: it sounds like a really upset guy with prunes in his mouth vomiting on occasions. Then we have very impressive use of the "aryan" language of our norsk arysk ancestors (English) spelled in a very unique (probably archaic way). Titles such as "Let's Our Folk Prevails" or "Horns Reflects on My Witchsteel" really sound very... majestic of course. The only thing that brings pleasure on this part is the 5 second long intros and outros which relieve you of the pain the rest of the tracks inflicted upon you. This is terrible and if you thought that was it, that was only the "Evil" side. The Moonblood side is a little bit better, winning almost all the points this tape gets. The guitars are audible and this time really have some nice distortion added. The music is also a little bit faster than Evil and even has nicely and rather neatly done soli and tapping parts in it. Actually the Moonblood material resembles old Bathory at times, but with a worse quality, which makes this tape hardly any pleasant to listen to, even for a fan of the genre.

Get this if you're really into bad quality black metal, or a complete Moonblood maniac. Keep away from the Evil part and just listen to other material with a better quality where one can actually hear the music.