At least
one member of this band has got to be an archaeologist - that is how far down in
the pit of old school this album is...
The pit of old school has been thoroughly excavated,
it's artefacts studied, and reassembled. Then, I
presume, it was set to the tune of a chainsaw, the end result recorded in a
bunker, with World war II technology... And it is not bad at all!
As a black metal fan since the bad old church burning days, I'm smitten, right
in my black heart, by this manifest of a debut. Black metal has been pronounced
dead so many times, and somehow it always reanimated into new and disturbing
forms of unlife. The grand style of Black Metal
is a monster with so many tentacles it risks strangling itself with them. Enter
Tower of Flesh with their temperamental, haunted full metal sound, mournful,
though cold as ice. This is not a reincarnation -
this is a complete resurrection of the black
metal stage, when it was at it's best/baddest.
For it's style, The Perpetual Paradox, is surprisingly varied, hauling in
numerous traditional tools from the aforementioned pit
of old school: gloomy intros, repetitive chords,
a certain affinity for memorable bridges, bloody raw recording and some rather
obscure song titles - all of it summed up in the brutally catchy Renounce the
Flesh.
