### Orthrelm: 2nd 18/04 norildivoth crallos lomrixth urthiln

#### 13/11/09 || Khlysty

One of the things that attract me to heavy music is the seemingly infinite repulsion of its proponents towards conformism: where other musical genres tend to fall into a rut (remember Frank Zappa’s great aphorism: “Jazz ain’t dead; just smells funny”…), heavy metal has a marked obsession with taking things to the next level, with pushing the envelope, with going into uncharted territories and fuck the consequences. That’s how, even in clearly defined subgenres, such as death metal, grindcore or black metal, there’s a whole slew of bands who are fucking with the rulebooks, destroying boundaries and opening new exciting vistas for experimentation or general fuckery.

The above paragraph was written so that I can tell you that even I, a champion of all that’s bizarre, crazy or plain fucked-up in metal, am in great turmoil when I try to tell you, the great masses, who, day after day, reach toward GD for enlightenment, about Orthrelm. See this band is the equivalent of Frank Zappa –at his most arcane and unapproachable- in the metal world. The duo of Mick Barr (guitar) and Josh Blair (drums) is most certainly a talented on. Barr’s speed, precision and dexterity is almost unparalleled in the whole universe; his shredding would make the great shredders of yore to blush, intimidated. Blair, on the other hand, is one of those drummers that you hope that they had been born earlier, so that he could have graced with his incredible skills records by John Coltrane or Dizzy Gillespie.

Together, these two guys create some of the most fucked-up “music” this side of Hell. The 15 tracks comprising this record are speed-of-light bursts of abstraction that move within –and without- the metal sphere. That is, they’re not headbangable (their tempo-, scale- and time-signature changes are so mind-bogglingly complex that one needs to resort to arcane algebra formulations to even begin to “get” them), they’re not mind-stickable (the complexity level I talked about a little earlier…) and they’re not catchy in any identifiable way: no hooks, no vocals, no nothing. Of course, this doesn’t mean that their not interesting: folks, here we’re talking about the quantum physics of metal and I cannot, for the life of me, not admire the way these two guys have fully composed (some say even fully annotated…), orchestrated and performed such pieces of incredible complexity in such compact timeframes.

If one wants to be truthful to oneself, one has to admit that Orthrelm’s music can very well NOT be considered as “metal”, as it seems to have more kinship with free jazz or other abstractions of musical genres. But, the fact remains that Barr and Blair never forget their metal roots; it’s just that their inspiration or ambition or whatnot has taken them into realms so ALIEN that it’s really difficult to approach their music with the same mind-frame one approaches, say, Dream Theater or Death or Cynic or any other super-talented metal band. They’re too far out, too angular, to unapproachable to make sense, even to the most jaded metalhead. So, the bottom line is that “2nd 18/04 Norildivoth Crallos Lomrixth Urthiln” is 28 minutes of guitar-and-drums skullfuckery, which can become very annoying to a lot of people real soon. I will say again that this is what Orthrelm is, so, uh, handle with UTMOST care…

P.S.: if you wanna get an idea of what Orthrelm sounds like, go to their website and watch them play live. And then, YOU tell me what you make out of them…

P.S.2: what do the song titles, or, for that matter, the record title, mean? Fuck if I know, me lads, fuck if I know…

- Information
- Released: 2002
- Label: Three One G
- Website: www.millionraces.com/orthrelm
- Band
- Mick Barr: guitar
- Josh Blair: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Aonkrit Iom-Spear
- 02. Chriosainqueilltor
- 03. Draoxaimm Lef Lan Growm
- 04. Norriill-Divotr
- 05. Gharaail Ist (Milrilm)
- 06. Cylryx-Agfolr
- 07. Optixun Straal
- 08. Allmuniekted
- 09. Scelxenak
- 10. Satrilvoithal
- 11. Altronate-Varl Viis
- 12. Hixor Sparril Monce
- 13. 2nd 13
- 14. 2nd 14
- 15. Urthiln