Xasthur-Subliminal Genocide

The music that comes from the mind of Malefic never ceases to amaze me. He has so much to put in his music that his songs are almost never shorter than seven minutes long. The thing I love most about Xasthur is that there is an unbelievable amount of emotion in the music; it’s mind blowing and I’ve only heard a small handful of others that can do that. Malefic claims that Burzum is the one that inspired his one-man approach to his project (Xasthur). His lyrical themes are unlike most black metal bands. Usually, in black metal you would find lyrical themes about Satanism, anti-religion, and Christian blasphemy. But Malefic’s lyrics are about death, suicide, despair, and depression. I am guessing he has had a pretty rough life to come up with such powerful messages in his songs.

I have almost everything by Xasthur, and Subliminal Genocide is my absolute favorite out of all the others. This album takes you on a journey of extremely strong emotions of depression and despair, and it is an amazing experience that never gets old. The sound of the guitar distortion is my favorite out of all of his other albums, having a bigger, broader sound with a bit more bass to it. The guitars also seem to be more in-tune than some of the other albums (some of them having extremely out of tune guitars that don’t sound very good). I also like the fact that I can hear Malefic’s amazing vocals more; the music doesn’t drown it out in this album. If you were to ask me what my favorite song from this album was, I could only narrow it down to four.

Prison of Mirrors is one of the more melodic songs, the message being about someone who hates himself being trapped in a room of mirrors, with nothing to look at but himself, also with nothing to kill himself with. The song has some very beautiful guitar parts, and the drums are on-time with the other instruments. Beauty is only Razor Deep is an amazing song. It’s probably the most depressing song off the album, but it’s an extremely delectable experience to listen to. There are some fast double kick drumming in the song, which gives it kind of an edgy sound at parts. This album has many interludes as well (unlike the other albums, only having an intro and an outro). Just the overall sound of Victim of Your Dreams is very sharp and higher pitched. It has a really thick, heavy sound that is really calming. The last song I would like to talk about is the title song. It has a very deep sound with a lot of bass that stands out. Malefic doesn’t really belt out his vocals as much in this song. He sounds more relaxed. This is a very great album that I would recommend to all black metal fans, and to any people that are still a bit new to black metal, this gets 20/20.