Rape Of The Bastard Nazerene - Akercocke

This debut release from the eternally besuited, well-groomed and well-mannered London gents who are nevertheless clearly going to Hell (if they really do believe all this stuff), fails to shake off the sense of being a slightly overlong demo tape. By slightly I mean it comes in at a still meagre thirty-five minutes rather than twenty-five, and by demo I mean unpolished, raw-sounding compositions connected by worthless interludes in a deceptive attempt to bulk out the track-list to something approaching ten. The good news is that the dingy world of black metal is perfectly suited to just this type of raw performance, many bands bizarrely sounding far more palatable when ...