My Review: Altar De Fey - The Insatiable Desire...

 My Review

Altar De Fey - The Insatiable desire...

2019

Limbs dissected and in which pain becomes an object of study, with the laceration of time that brings, within an increasingly complicit and enslaved soul, the consent of raging and tremendous demons.

Jets of liquid and turbid air like beneficial mud enter the orgasmic tracks to separate evil from the rest of the world, with lateral explosions coming out of caves and mystical dens.

A procession of the sacred heart of Deathrock which makes everything evil and suffocating, hyperactive and asphyxiating, where the San Francisco band takes, for this album, elaborations of the 1983-1985 period and freezes them in time for an eternity that will magnify its murderous tendency with songs that are sonic and psychic attacks.

This is their second work after their comeback and everything goes on smoothly: the extent of the pain to be carried has not yet reached the masses.

Of that line-up, the original one, active for five years but which at the time did not publish anything, Kent Cates remains, guitarist and investigator of the extreme trends of sound and its evil, a triumphant of arch and rough splinters, master creator of pain who knows how to make it real with those fingers that sacrifice good on the altar of the God of Evil.

And with him Aleph Kali, the controller of time, the one who with his drums and drum kit makes the heaviness of rhythm extend like a knife and lava rock.

The two of them, veterans and survivors, have brought to their smoky and gaseous temple the devilish Jake Hout, the voice of endless screams, a wolf of the ancient sepulchres, to take him for a ride inside his vocal chords full of grating and halberds, to frighten life with his raw propensity without any fear.

And the other new black angel is Skot Brown, a marble and merciless heavy hand of the tribal and obscene bass, a big thorn with a black cloak that suffocates and oppresses with its notes that are inspections and punishments at the same time.

They are insatiable desires that take thirty-five minutes to show their face and their hallucinating propensity for destruction and suicide: shorter than a Catholic mass, but too long for any lucid and sunny soul, because this procession and investigation becomes unbearable for those who fear the reality of this time.

There are no discounts, no benefits allowed, no escape: once you get to these eight tombstones the journey into the cemetery of hanged dreams will be the triumph of the hill of nightmares, so be prepared to become shreds of decaying life.

With a look towards the nearby Oakland, where everything boils and sows assorted wickednesses in a mighty procession, the band from San Francisco inflicts the most tremendous defeat to the young generations who think that Deathrock can find new forms and mixtures. Never! You have to be damned. And in order to establish the rules and genuflections these four guys shoot songs with the purity of a genre that cannot undergo contamination and manipulation.

History was born to repeat itself and to make clear from the outset the short boundaries that these sketchy melodic propensities can have.

Everything has remained as it was forty years ago: no artificial braziers, no digressions are allowed, no modern devilry to inflict sonic humiliation.

Altar De Fey dig burrows, set traps, scratch the earth with hands that do not scream with pain: on the contrary, they launch powerful cries of evil and corrosive joy.

Their breath knows aggression, their ears bend bleeding and the lump in their throats becomes the joyful explosion of darkness.

The sadness and disappointment of a muddy life combine, like tangled and ravenous snakes, poison in massive doses inside these craters of sound that gravitate in the belly like a sword of Damocles in constant approach: there is no escape from death and we might as well know it in advance.

The four guys create in order to make the songs become twin towers in continuous explosion where not even the dust will be able to rise from the rubble: everything will be closed in the welcoming cave, everything will be an infinite and deadly silence as these sonic labyrinths are.

These songs that want to throttle the palaces of a sterile and rigid market that does not want interference are sins with long arms. 

Altar De Fey cannot accept the delirium of people who try to subjugate the masses and launch black-coloured arrows and curses to bury intentions and possessions.

Music, then, as a planetary funeral that, having learned the lesson of punk and post-punk, throws kilos of black ink as extreme vomit, to sully the world in order to make it aware. 

Deathrock is acid and tribal and the San Francisco band enhances the root by taking it into the corridors of the central nervous system to explode all resistance.

Everything becomes epic and perverse, diseased and without incoming forces: you sweat dancing on the notes of the seriousness of existence and rent broken glass to deliver to hands and legs in constant propulsion.

If someone thinks that in Deathrock is congenital the gene of boredom is not wrong: this is a music which expresses the truth of a world that invents joys and satisfactions with short breath.

Let's prefer the truth.

Then it can only be ashes in flight.

Songs that become manic, frustrating niches that do nothing but lower the will of dreams to win the war.

Martial and obsessive, they know how to linger until they generate the welcome annoyance of textures that extinguish the light at every second.

There are no hybrids in their compositions, but songs like black thoroughbred horses on wild, coordinated rides: their beauty lies in their purity.

The album features Edgar Alan Poe writing odes to the acrid smell of death on the skin of bats and he does so while walking with Howard Phillips Lovecraft, for a horror story of biblical proportions, because the lyrics in this work connect black poetry to the most conspicuous fear.

One example is the granitic "The Secret", an unattainable supernova in perpetual race with its bass fraught with crumbling rocks and the sick, elliptical guitar, which moves to escape the fear it generates: the most depressing form is the indulgence that frees everyone in a harrowing and terrifying race.

And the two American writers are also present in the mephystolic "Vampires" where the Virgin Prunes appear at foot power, in a lysergic state of full exaltation.

With "You do not scare me" it is The Lords of The New Church who peep out, as if filled with drops of wolfsbane.

But this work is a workshop that has raw materials coming out of its own subsoil, showing how relevant this band has been and has conditioned the nightly raids of thousands of followers.

Altar De Fey have crafted an album that excels in operations performed without anaesthesia, with songs that will splash through the brain as a legacy of a primordial idea of the complete destruction of all colours...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld 

Salford

March 12th, 2022

https://open.spotify.com/album/5A0KxSuvWWJdpAX7W9JrQf?si=fICnxlEdSZWo-ltq7KuxNg

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/the-insatiable-desire/1508732501