Welcome to Last Plane to Jakarta's first-ever interview!

(Disclaimer: the interview that follows never took place. We do not doubt that an actual interview with Kult ov Azazel would go pretty much the way all black metal interviews go: interviewer asks a question that indicates he's part of the 1337 BM h0rdez ["Your sound recalls the early Spear of Longinus demos, but in a more necro and ultimately progressive way. Was this your intention?"], band goes directly into the script, remaining in character and, after the manner of a politician, on-message ["Yes. We felt that whereas others have shown the way and we must give them hails as brave warriors along the path to total war, yet must we carve our own grim visages into the stones at road's end, as it were. Our second demo continued in this rippped vein," etc], interviewer asks follow-ups whose main purpose is to assert that he has in fact managed to construe some sense out of what is essentially swords-and-sorcery gobbledegook ["Certainly. But don't you think that what's happened with the commercialization of pro-nationalist black metal has eliminated the weak, leaving a cleaner field for the few remaining, the discerning listeners?"], rinse lather repeat. This isn't to say that we don't think Kult ov Azazel are intelligent: on the contrary, we're sure they are. We're equally certain, though, that black metal culture is stuck in an odd mirror-maze where stagnation is confused with fidelity to the genre, and consequently counted as a virtue, and where, for every innovator, there are twenty bands rehashing the same old tropes, styles, images and stances that, while new and challenging at the genre's birth, are now as dully conservative in their way as mainstream Christianity.

Having said all that. Kult ov Azazel's new album is a genuinely great black metal album, a beacon of energy in a genre that's been spinning its wheels for a while. KoA sounds genuinely excited by the music they're playing, and it makes all the difference in the world. One doesn't hear nearly enough black metal that sounds motivated and passionate about itself. KoA's new album does such a great job of things that we wanted to celebrate it in our own way. "Our own way" will probably seem frivolous at best and disrespectful at worst to people who take their black metal very seriously. What can we say? We like Kult ov Azazel, and we think that the surest way to kill a genre is to tell people they're not supposed to be having fun. The temptation to air out the several dozen other difficulties one runs into when favorably reviewing a black metal album is severe, but let us resist it for now, and proceed with our interview.)

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