This Sounds like Buzz Osborne on drugs—that is the first thing that Kjetil Nernes’ voice brings to mind. Imagine Melvins, but several times more punk, paranoid and drugged-out, and then expressing rage that only the descendents of true Vikings could muster.
This music is gruesome, most metal bands can be described as brutal, heavy or evil, but Årabrot have created their own classification: gruesome. There is no other way to describe this stuff. This is some of the most violent noise/sludge to have ever been created. Most sludge bands can do the heavy thing with no problem, but Årabrot are so tense and aggressive, like a group of violent criminals, that they broke into music itself, slaughtered everyone and left absolutely no clues as to their motives. Coincidentally, Årabrot is a correctional facility for troubled youths where the band met, which just isn’t something you can make up.
Melvins slammed into noise rock, bludgeoned with some metallic breed of hardcore and then left to die of exposure in the Norwegian wilderness. It drags its battered and crushed carcass confidently across the scene, boasting of its bruises and contusions; this is perversion at its prime.
This isn’t an album for everyone, but the sludgiest of people. This is like a shotgun shell of sludge delivered to the iniquitous face of lame music, perhaps the grittiest, dirtiest album to have been heaved from the bowels of heavy music in a very long time. Revenge for all the crappy music that came before it.
In A Word: Pestilential
