So you're walking home from school one fine afternoon and you decide to take a shortcut through Farmer Brown's pasture. After climbing over the barbed wire fence and traipsing through the field, you hop over a ditch embankment and land directly upon a rusty old pitchfork. One of the prongs snakes into the bottom of your sneakers and slices right through your foot. If the sound of that decaying, rusted metal could be captured as it punctures your skin, that sound would be paralled in Impaled Nazarene's debut album, Tol Cormpt Norz Norz Norz.

Frankly, this is some pretty ugly, painful stuff, kids. Featuring session input from Sentenced's Taneli Jarva, Impaled Nazarene wastes no time in getting to the point with their densely packed assault on the senses. The nearly monotonous unchanging nature of their music, which is a hybrid of early black metal, speed metal and deathly thrash ugliness, actually benefits the impact of this record. There are but scant moments of relief in the half hour this record consumes and they are in the form of a couple keyboard interludes. But don't expect them to save your sorry self. This album is all assault and battery, fists and chains. The vocals are demonic and deranged, like a Hell's Angel possessed by a demon and on amphetamines. With titles like "Goat Perversion" and "Condemned to Hell", you know this band isn't painting a portrait endorsed by Norman Rockwell. Almost too intense, there is still something stylish about music this pointedly grotesque and repulsive. We all know that metalhead who loves music uglier than the kid from Gummo and this album is just for him.

Review by John Chedsey

Review date: 01/2001

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