### Naer Mataron: Long live death

#### 03/08/12 || Averatu

I was trying to avoid the stubs section but alas, here we are. Naer Mataron are a dream signing for any extreme label, a controversial bunch generating all the publicity you can eat. The band must be running like the proverbial headless chickens, only these are sacrificial black roosters, or cocks if you will. The link of Neo-Nazi to black metal is nothing new, so meh? I’m not much of a Nazi myself, in fact I have fond memories of my teens, running for my life from skinheads, my favourite form of exercise in the good old days.

This album is a long way from “Skotos Aenaon”, their 2000 collection of raw black anthems in honour of the dark lord Satan. It sounds like a different band, only retaining the blasphemous subject matter. It reminds me of the way Behemoth went from their 1996 album “Grom”, which is a collection of raw black anthems in honour of all things dark and evil, to “Satanica” in 1999 and subsequent blackened death albums.

The quality of this recording is sound, the band can obviously play their instruments to deliver the desired level of blackened brutality, even if I can’t understand a word of what he’s singing (are the lyrics in English, or am I just being rhetorical). It has all the elements I like in music, I want to like it, but I think familiarity breeds disinterest in this case. If your criteria for music reads satanic plus blackened plus death-metal plus blasphemous, then this album fits square in your inverted pentagram-shaped cookie cutter.

6/10: Inverted pentagram-shaped cookie cutter.