Corpus Christii – Luciferian Frequencies

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It’s always humorous when a black metal band comes from somewhere with a hot climate. Madrid’s Teitanblood, Los Angeles’ Lightning Swords of Death, and Lisbon’s Corpus Christii all attempt to invoke coldness and desolation while suffering heat strokes underneath their denim and leather, and while they tend to succeed on the desolation front, there’s always a certain atmosphere to warm-weather black metal that isn’t present in the frozen stuff. Luciferian Frequencies, the seventh LP by the Portuguese one-man act, has that atmosphere. One gets the sense that even while he’s presumably channeling Satan with his vocals, Nocturnus Horrendus is actually screaming because he’s pissed off about how hot it is – and having recently spent a painfully sweat-drenched weekend in Madrid, I think I could have recorded some very similar vocals. Musically, the album is fairly black-metal-by-numbers. There’s tremolo-picked riffs. There’s blastbeats. This goes here, that goes there. The production is crisp and modern, and while the drums are surprisingly allowed to breathe, the guitars are overcompressed and the result is a series of riffs that could have serious oomph left sounding more like high-quality midi files. And yet, the album is an enjoyable listening experience, and that’s almost entirely because of Horrendus’ vocal acrobatics. Running the spectrum from deep, almost death metal-like growls, to terrified-sounding spoken word parts, to black metal shrieks more ungodly than anything this side of Watain, to insane-asylum ramblings reminiscent of Burzum‘s Vanvidd, to a fascinating moment at the end of Picatrix where Horrendus actually hocks a loogie into the microphone in disgust. If the production was good and the music was as interesting as the vocals, Luciferian Frequencies would be a masterpiece. Instead, we’re left with a fairly standard issue but inoffensive black metal album still worth listening to thanks to some incredible singing, shouting, screaming, and carrying on.

Written by Brad Sanders
More: 2011, Albums, Black Metal, Quick.Play Reviews, Corpus Christii