I also got a double CD by a Finnish black-metal band called Horna which gets to have its cake and eat it too. It’s a compilation of the four releases they put out at the rate of one a year from 1997 through 2000. The first CD is great; it contains both their 1997 album Hiidentorni and their 1998 album Kohti Yhdeskan Nousua, and the whole shebang runs just under 73 minutes. It is predictably a little exhausting, since Horna plays the sort of black metal that gets praised by its acolytes in wonderfully colorful abusive language -- the kind of stuff, I mean, that an impressed listener might describe as “filthy, raw black metal” or “cancerous, Christ-crushing Nordic spew.” Horna is among the best at this kind of thing; they wear the corpsepaint, which is de rigeur if quite silly, and and they’ve really got it in for Jesus, which is the mark of one’s dedication to the black metal craft. The CD booklet has two faces, printed in differing orientations so that you can choose for yourself which picture will look out at you through the jewel case; I reversed mine, so that I see the image of a shadowy axe-wielding skeleton in a brambly bush on an islet in some water instead of the rather more disturbing alternate front cover, which is a crudely rendered drawing of Jesus Christ on the cross with a broadsword stuck into his sternum, its handle and six spare inches of blade protruding nastily.
