Goat Ritual

-Git yer mop 'n' bleech to cleen up this grisly mess-

Negro Altar is a lost-and-found black metal band from the mid-90s southern-tip of Brazil. Their 'Goat Ritual' demo is a combination of the accidental and the intentional. Though I have to honestly say accidents and mishaps give way to dominate this lo-fi recording that after it's listened to and done with you can mostly close the lid on from where it originally came from. Yes, the sound is out there, this is the BFM of LSD, the horizontal to the vertical peaks and rises of musical foray. The band devastates their and your speakers and fuzzes up their instruments so you can get not only a physically distorted mess, but an abstract distorted fiasco.

Effects disarm and disassemble how you might perceive a traditional production or how a traditional song may sound. Though the band is thoroughly sloppy in their playing even with talk of production withheld and it shows shamelessly like an old mustard stained t-shirt that you still wear to wash the car but haven't yet been busted with it on outright. The drums sound slightly varying to drastically different, most likely due to recording 'Goat Ritual' in different sessions and the equipment and microphones uncaringly or unintentionally being moved around and about. On three of the tracks the Class-Z drumming (related to miscues out the wazoo) closely resembles an acoustic set and on the remaining tracks this uses a drum machine or electronic set that appears to have a few bugs and mis-commands from its master. The type of technology that might overrun humanity as seen in so many Japanese anime flicks. Your headbanging might start to look like jittery seizures more with the acoustic sections if you didn't watch out.

This is even equipped with an acoustic guitar intro and wind samples that by now looks standard fare. But the band even makes clean guitar sound like some youthful, lost and primitive guitar scale mucked up. I'm not picking on them for basicness, it is just something that I can't take seriously due to how it sounds like the man-behind-the-instrument giving it a very sketchy first try. Some of their noisy whammy solos that are going for more atmospherics than musicianship even make someone like Tom Warrior look like some kind of shredder. The distorted guitars take the lead or the background, however you want to look at it. Though the song writing is a wall of noise and most unfortunately a wall to where the music should be going to with any meaning. This typically plays a few riffs that are going for the simplicity of something like Darkthrone's 'Transilvanian Hunger' for an understandable comparison (though not sounding anything like it to be mistaken for it). And unlike Darkthrone, Negro Altar sorely learned and poorly experimented and just fell short, really, really short for not honing their craft, and most importantly lacking intuition from what I can tell by not building up from prior influences outside of what was new in black metal at that point. And I feel that their downfall is marginally being able to pull that off on their own merit; essentially like their idea of music theory is more fantastical than substantial. This doesn't sound like anything even loosely from the '80s, no one says it has to, but it might of given a helping push towards something more evolving instead of buzzing a few non-descript, primitive chords back and forth in hope that the magic will take over.

This has some faster sections and other parts with more of a medium pace to it. The idea was to try and create a sustaining trance, yet in the end the recordings can annoy and rage 'at' them instead of 'with' them for the type of chaotic tunes they produce. The vocals use more of an extended, slurred rasp with some fluctuating screams and partial shouts. Yet they are dumped with effects and hardly any measurement seems to be used, no "this sounds cool" or "that's too much" was implemented. For an idea, it sounds like a tape recorder picked up simultaneously played tennis matches with wind on the microphone from a twister in the background distorting yells and groans into something exaggerated to the point of being cartoonish and demonic. The more I listen to the recordings, the more I can't take the band sincerely, as if the more time unravels the more it hurts the band's last remaining shreds of what they've got left that's deemed useful, if that.

How much we as listeners of the underground love to find something that is a lost gem. Especially something that was experimental for its time and didn't get a chance like the rest, or compared to something well-known that you think shouldn't have been given a chance. This here, with all brutal honestly, is something that hasn't been widely brought up in conversations for being ingenious, moving, or inspiring. Because it is none of the mentioned. It is realistically close to being utterly terrible, though merely hanging by threads because it wasn't something that was done a million times for '95 and if it came out recently as a demo and I felt like wasting my time I'd probably give out a rare zero without hesitation; for some pre-dated perspective: something along the lines of what Xasthur would do later on, yet much more structurally with the drum machine, distorted to hell vocals, and a kind of meshed production job. Though back to '95, I'd like to think the band members were listening, reading, or night-dreaming of some decent and against-the-grain material to inspire them so, and going with that line of thought had the right idea for themselves on the planning boards until the thought 'actual' met hard with the 'factual.' Though to be fair this is a demo after all, and I don't mean to be completely cruel because I'm still on the look out for some of those lost and aged demos that might be worth it still for repeat comebacks. Though unfortunately for Negro Altar in the end, it didn't work as well as it could have due to the band in my opinion not taking their time here in gradual steps at this point, or just plain their confidence got ahead of their physical ability. Yet again, maybe this wasn't meant to see the light of day, or for the suckers who are easily pulled in by the year of its release like I was. (For the next man-eater see Songe d'Enfer)

What we have here is a very kvlt demo being re-released, what's very good to us, since we never could get it before it's re-release.

Brazilian Old School Black Metal is quite known for it's extremism towards scene and music, Negro Altar is completely inside this concept, the best definition it would receive is "Necro, Blasphemous, Raw and Satanic".
The Goat Ritual art gives a perfect climate to what you hear, a big goat head in the cover, black and white xerox and true satanic titles.

Musically it sounds perfectly like a mix between Bathory - Bathory, Mayhem - Pure Fucking Armageddon and Hellhammer Demos.
Special attention to the song "Massacrando o Cristão com a Serra-Elétrica", that could trully be a black metal anthen.

It's a honour to us to listen something like it, that was buried in the ashes of the old extreme scene, if you are into oldschool-harsh-black-metal, try to get it, NOW!