Crimson Massacre - The Luster Of Pandemonium

(24 May 2011)

You know those albums that the first time you listen, you think "holy shipment, I love this", like as though it connects with you on some sort of level? Yeah, there's probably something wrong with you if that applies to Luster of Pandemonium. The first torturous listen of "Catalyst's Tongue" provided me with quite a lot of pompous laughs and pompous loss of hope for humanity when I read all the positive comments for it on Youtube. The hope for humanity was reduced even more when I found 5 star ratings for this abomination. Eventually I succumbed to curiosity and had to check out the whole album.

Did my opinion on the album change then? Not really. It was all a jumbled nonsense of thin guitars, uncomfortable drums, a weird vocalist and a nonexistent bassist, all playing hell knows what in the most compressed and overall awful production in the history of Technical Death Metal. Oh, and in the middle of it all, an 11 minute acoustic instrumental where nothing happens. If there was an album worthy of 0.5 on the face of the Earth, it was this one.

For some reason, though, I kept listening to it, giving it chance after chance to prove its worth. After all, there did seem to be the interesting 2 seconds here and there. And then I started noticing the patterns. There were riffs, and they were crap, but then they came together in patterns, in cycles. The sounds emanating from the headphones had no atmosphere, no musical value, just texture. Meanwhile, the structures are perfectly calculated, almost mathematical, repeating microriffs in different orders to move the songs forward and have them progress in a logical way. And then the melodies also started showing. It's a great feeling when you start making sense of what is an otherwise incomprehensible album.

I wish I could give this album 5. The first half is absolute perfection, and the whole album is some of the most artful metal I've ever heard. The problem is that the second half is just unremarkable in comparison. Still, The Luster Of Pandemonium is an album that is hard to get into but ultimately very rewarding if one is patient enough. Listen to it, listen again, again, again, wait...

Standout tracks:

Catalyst's Tongue
The Devourer
Epoch
The Hyperborean's Epitaph
Of Perverted Hope And Fragmented Suffering