Co-released with
Supremacy Through Intolerance.
Compilation of the band's complete discography.
Tracks 1-4: The New Order 7" (Wimp, 1993)
Tracks 5-7: Shower Power Tape (1995)
Tracks 8-12: Corpse Crater Tape (Forget Heaven, 1994)
Tracks 13-20: Jinx Tape (Dutch Suicide Committee, 1996)
The man behind Bhaobhan Sidhe, Conscicide Dominus Arcula, committed suicide on August 8th, 2008, on his 35th birthday. Since 3 + 5 equals eight, that's a quadruple eight for his suicide date. 8888. Now here's the compilation of his material called
Gas Chamber Music...
And if the opening paragraph didn't convince you the guy is pro-level nutso, the music certainly will. For what it's worth, despite the numbers, I don't think this political music. You think you may need some Skrewdriver if you have that many screws loose, but one of the main requirements for politics is that you'd actually want something out of this world, and Conscicide in his lifetime already drifted too far off into another for that to be the case. An outro called "Barberism" consists of a sample of an interview with an extermination camp barber about giving haircuts in an extermination camp - Auschwitz I assume since that's the one everyone knows - and it's like the best Nazi sample ever. Forget Goebbels total war samples, gotta listen to a guy giving an in-depth explanation of cutting Auschwitz inmates' hair. Welcome to Bhaobhan Sidhe.
What do you call this exactly? Black ambient? Like that French LLN stuff? Except in the final stages of cerebral cancer. It's something like that, black ambient, mixed with bizarrely upbeat martial industrial elements that sound like very old Looney Tunes soundtracks reinterpreting early Laibach on a cheap keyboard. There's some really primitive and demented black metal stuff from the first demo, about as raw and simplistic as it gets, but I am personally more than okay with it only lasting four tracks, because while not bad, the real attraction here is the style they (there's another guy, know nothing about him, has no double-88 suicide to show for, either) found after that brief initial period. Only the raspy vocals remain.
There's just something so delightfully creepy about how messed up it all is. I know a track by an ambient band called Nazi UFO Commander that talks about how people from Aldebaran are taking over Earth after they discovered the Nazis copied their UFO designs, but Bhaobhan Sidhe goes further off the deep end than even that, and that's without even knowing any of the lyrics, if there are any. There's a lot of holocaust-related stuff in the titles, but it's the music that makes it so bizarre. It's so cartoonish, somewhere in the middle between suffocatingly dark/evil and dumbfoundingly ridiculous. It makes me imagine flesh-eating Nazi zombies more than anything, or the thing from
The Thing ravaging a concentration camp. Or the doctor from
Brain Dead...
I don't know if it's a classic by any means, but it stands out as one of the weirdest outgrowths of the early black metal scene, as the most outlandish of all the black ambient "dungeon synth" side-projects that came along with the flourishing second wave. I like it a lot because it gives me the chills with how cartoonishly it treats such a grave subject matter and how perverse an atmosphere one can create with a simple mix of black ambient and cheesy lo-fi martial industrial elements. It's an essential all time favourite for me, and something I warmly recommend to all those curious about the strangest things that came from the forming years of black metal.
Sample:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXKisvvx5c0
