The Secret Agnus Dei

It was bound to come to this.  This record is an example of what is being politely called extreme metal.  Basically it is music that has reached the limits of volume and saturation and is therefore only a barely distinguishable mess of sound bearing no relation to anything human beings experience outside of electroshock therapy.  Maybe that’s what it’s supposed to represent.  If so then job well done, although about 10 seconds of it would have been enough for me to get the point.  My friends and I used to joke about an old film clip from the fifties where a stodgy middle aged man pulls a record off a turntable, declares “This rock and roll has got to go!”, and then smashes it against the table.  Now, sadly, I know what he meant.  I know, I’m not supposed to get it, and dutifully, I don’t, or I refuse to, call it what you will.  I’ll bump the rating by 1 in the spirit of restless experimentation that made this godawful assault of high-midrangy tones inevitable.  Now that someone has done it, perhaps we can move on.