Vault Review: Abdijah – Satanic Rebellion Crushed
I’ve never made a secret about my love for the Polish unblack metal horde, Fire Throne. To my mind, they were one of the best expressions of pure unblack metal music and aesthetic I’d ever encountered.
But of course, Fire Throne was just one of the many acts associated with the two members of the band (Fire and Unblasphemer). Most of these acts revolved around Fire himself, chiefly in the form of his main project Elgibbor, but also with his other projects like Katumus, Tertullian, Nuclear Blaze, and more recently, Pozar. But the drummer Unblasphemer, whose apparent motto was “play fast, or don’t,” (if I remember correctly from a Polish documentary on Christian black metal that featured Fire Throne – now, sadly, no longer on Youtube from what I can see) languished somewhat in the background. Enter Abdijah and the project’s sole release, Satanic Rebellion Crushed.
Abdijah took Unblasphemer’s personal play style to its logical conclusion. With the sole member depicted covered in bullet belts, corpse paint, and what appears to be blood, it was obvious what the listener was going to be in for. This wasn’t black metal of the popular (as antithetical as that sounds, when you consider the original intent of black metal) variety – no symphonies, vampires, or melodic solos. Nor was it simply raw for the sake of being raw, reducing itself to something more akin to violent noise experimentation than anything remotely resembling conventionality (such as what one might see in bands like Verdelger, Abruptum, or Ildjarn). Rather, Abdijah capitalized on something different – maintaining a sense of the raw and immediate, while simultaneously capturing black metal’s underlying sense of melancholic beauty in its riffing (and for those who don’t believe me, a quick listen to Emperor’s In the Nightside Eclipse or Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger will suffice as examples).
Satanic Rebellion Crushed certainly approaches song craft with a sense that repetition can create atmosphere, and in this case, it works, though not in orthodox fashion. Unblasphemer’s drum work focuses on speed at the cost of technicality, his snare coming off more like a tinny machine-gun in the distance rather than conventional drumming. There is little variance here, something actually of great stylistic advantage in black metal that allows for the repetitive riffs to breathe and create their own atmosphere through their blending over and over into each other. Anyone who’s listened at length to albums like Transilvanian Hunger, Das Tor or His Lyset Tar Oss will know what I mean here. But that’s not to say that Abidjah’s riffs necessarily blur together to create a wash of noise; in fact, they are quite defined, but their murky, almost haunting tone nonetheless manages to create an atmosphere of its own, one wherein chords are defined from each other, and yet connected in seemingly endless sequence like a rushing black river that changes its course multiple times over a short distance.
Where Abidjah’s record struggles more than Unblasphemer’s other projects is down to personal taste, really. For some, the extreme emphasis on repetition in terms of song structure will put off fans of more dynamic black metal; further, though Satanic Rebellion Crushed isn’t the most raw record out there, it’s certainly lo-fi and almost subdued in its production, which gives yet one more reason why some will find it too rough to listen to. Others might find the monochromatic and simplistic approach of the six tracks on here to be unimaginative and lacking in diversity, even if on a relative scale.
Lyrically, Abdijah falls into that camp of Christian metal bands mostly content to recite passages from the Scriptures; while that’s obviously fine, I do wish bands would be a little more creative than simply copy-pasting chunks of Scripture into their music. That said, the track entitled “Kadosh Kadosh Kadosh” is written in Hebrew, something I’ve never really seen a metal band do before. But in essence, if you’ve been privy to the lyrics on Fire Throne’s Day of Darkness and Blackness album, it’s about the same here.
Overall, Abdijah’s work is definitely worth checking out if you’re into the more minimalistic, raw side of black metal. Though Unblasphemer’s project never quite got the attention that Fire’s projects would, I think it’s a worthwhile little slice of furious, cold unblack that shouldn’t be left to obscurity.
Believe it or not, for an album that was limited, according to Discogs, to just 25 copies (!), you can still find a digital download of it at Omnipotent Radio Records, HERE.
For Fans Of: Vomoth, Fire Throne, Armageddon Holocaust, Darkthrone (early), Judas Iscariot
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