Torch Of War "The Principle Of Cosmic Instability" CD

Furious German black metal sitting atop the throne of scathing, uncaring & unabashedly cold records of this genre. Every single track a gem on it's own and every riff completing the circle started by Darkthrone with Transilvanian Hunger. A record made by Torch Of War for Torch Of War...this beast left in tow for your ritual worship. Out now!

Seeing Autopsy Kitchen release something like this always struck me as a little strange- it's not as obviously weird or ambient/noise inspired as their typical output, and musical style itself isn't super congruent with the rest of the label's material, but hey, it's got a really noisy, grating production job, so maybe that's the appeal. I guess that's the aim of this album, really: a pretty normal black metal album but with an ultra-harsh, noisy production job which recontextualizes old riffs into a modern black metal setting? Maybe, but that sounds pretty lame and pretentious.
Seriously though, I'm on the fence about this production job. I kind of like what they're getting at, but on the other hand, it pretty much makes me feel like I have severe tinnitus whenever it's on. The guitar tone is basically as high pitched as an electric razor- there's not a hint of bass to be found anywhere in the string section, and while it has some measure of appeal in just how blown out it is, it gets tedious by the end of the album. Or by the end of the first song. One of those two. The drum machine, oddly enough, sounds pretty nice, with a fairly full body, some good aural space, and surprisingly solid sample choices making it stand out; then again, the manner in which it was recorded sounds so far removed from the guitars and vocals it can come off as sort of incoherent.
Wow, I spent a long time talking about the production. Well, that's because there's not a whole lot else that differentiates Torch of War from any other throwback black metal album. Most of the riffs are sculpted from Norwegian black metal- well, not so much Norwegian black metal as what modern kids think Norwegian black metal sounded like- mostly Darkthrone by way of some Swedish stuff, and the songs tend to just be blast beats and the occasional midpaced passage for variation. It all feels sort of arbitrary- the vocals basically live in the same aural register as the guitars which reduces their significance, the riffs vaguely connect to each other but all feel sort of interchangeable at the same time, and the drums just sort of knock away. There's no real sense of significance to this stuff- it's listenable, and there's cool riffs sometimes, but I sort of expect a headier concept from Autopsy Kitchen than what amounts to Scandinavian black metal worship with unusually obnoxious production.
I used to really not like this disc, and over the past couple years of intermittently listening to it, I've sort of warmed up to it. That being said, it's definitely not worth that much time if the effort is conscious at all.

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