The Gospel of the Horned One

Between Orlok’s maniacal cackle, playful guitar melodies, bouncy bass and ghetto drum machine, Countess is a band that can never be mistaken for another. For better or worse, Countess always has its own unique sound. That makes listening to the first Countess album quite a strange experience. This is Countess before Countess, so to speak. Countess has been a one man band since 1995, but on the debut release, The Gospel of the Horned One, Countess is actually a three piece band and frankly, quite a bad one. Little more than poorly performed and terribly produced Bathory worship, The Gospel of the Horned One is a rough start to the Countess project.

There are tons of problems with this recording. First, this is straight forward Bathory worship with absolutely no original contributions. There are faster, thrashier tracks that replicate Bathory’s faster, thrashier tracks and there are slower, doomier tracks that replicate Bathory’s slower, doomier tracks. That’s the entire musical spectrum of the album. “Fullmoon Baptism,” the most offensive culprit, boarders on plagiarism of “Enter the Eternal Fire.”

What really makes this album so bad is the production. It’s quite amazing how bad the mix is on this album. The guitars are really loud and sharp. Sometimes in raw black metal, such in-your-face guitars can create an extremely vicious tone (i.e. Mütiilation). Here it just sounds cheap. On the faster tracks there’s so much feedback that its impossible to distinguish any tune whatsoever. The bass is extremely flat but almost as loud as the guitar; it’s like watching a fish out of water aimlessly flopping about on the inevitable path toward death. The drums are almost all cymbal and high hat. The toms and bass are mostly inaudible. The vocals are drowned deep, deep within the mix as if Orlok was screaming a few rooms away.

The performance is also pretty bad. There are some really awkward moments where it sounds like the band forgets how the song goes but just lets the tape keep on recording. For example, at one point on “Fullmoon Baptism,” the guitar stops playing and the Orlok does some horrendous bass solo (or perhaps he is tuning) that is totally out of rhythm with the drums, which are playing at twice the speed. When the band isn’t falling into complete and utter disarray, they still sound out of synch.

A certain amount of cheapness and sloppiness has always been a part of Countess’s free-spirited charm, but The Gospel of the Horned One takes that way too far. The production is about as bad as it gets and there’s no retrieving it through appeals to “raw” or “cult” aesthetic because this album fails to create an atmosphere. The only thing that saves this album from being a complete an utter disaster is that there are some good melodies on some of the slower songs and some of the keyboard intros aren’t half bad. Still, nothing can save The Gospel of the Horned One from bargain bin status.

(Originally written for http://deinos-logos.blogspot.com/)

The first Countess album offers primitive black metal which seems to be inspired by Bathory’s “The Return” and “Under the Sign of the Black Mark” plus Hellhammer. This is “fresh” in the sense that Countess at least didn’t try to copy the sound of the Norwegian scene like so many others did, yet nobody can claim that this album brings anything new to the table (even for 1993’s standards) – it doesn’t. Countess simply pay tribute to old school black metal and are content with that.

The playing isn’t always that tight, e.g. on some tracks you can notice how the bass and guitar play out of time with each other. The structure of the music is very simple; there are only a few riffs per track. This means that the tracks sometimes suffer from too much repetitiveness but despite this I still can’t say that this is a totally terrible album. It just stays too close to Countess’ influences for comfort and is unable to reach the same level as their influences. These types of albums are always a bit difficult for me because even if I like old school BM, I think bands should also try to bring some own identity into their music. Otherwise we can just keep listening to those old classics, as there’s not really any incentive to bother with the new bands, right? Most of the time the music is mid-paced but songs like e.g. “Doomed to Die” and “Crossing the Fires of Darkness” contain blastbeats too, although these blastbeats aren’t very fast. There’s synth on some tracks for extra atmosphere but as I’m sure you already understood, symphonic black metal this is not. Even some guitar solos can be found and they are pure Bathory rip-offs.

The production is OK: rough but not of the overtly thin’n’trebly kind of many early 90s BM releases (and certainly better than on latter Countess albums like e.g. “The Return of the Horned One” and “The Book of the Heretic”). I’d say the band have gone for a production similar to the first two Bathory albums and Hellhammer’s “Satanic Rites” demo. They also succeed quite well with this. The only thing I really dislike about the production is that the drums and the vocals are too low in the mix.

“Overture” is the only non-metal track: a somewhat creepy ambient piece consisting of keyboard soundscapes. It’s not a bad track as such but it lasts too long, over four minutes. I’d say about a minute’s length would have been suitable for this track because it’s quite boring in its present form. The only people I recommend “The Gospel of the Horned One” to are those that are completely fanatic about old school black metal and don’t give a shit about originality. Countess does succeed paying tribute to an era, however, the lack of own ideas, the clumsiness, the unnecessarily long ambient track and the oddly loose structure (perhaps I should call it arrangements) of some of the tracks leave a lot to be desired.