| Time will tell whether Kataklysm’s new album (it’s called Epic: the Poetry of War) will find its way onto the dusty shelves of our straw-man purist, but it assures itself a place in the hearts of esoterics like us from its very first moments. The band itself had already earned this place a while back, when their album The Prophecy had led off with the inscrutable, headcrushing “1999:6661:2000,” a song which, because it contains the impenetrable lyric “Nineteen-ninety-nine/six-six-six/six-one,” can comfortably said to completely rule. The Prophecy was an album about -- well, it was about something, that’s for sure, though you couldn’t really say what. It seemed to have some futuristic dystopia in mind: “Towards the millennium/The end is coming” follows the lyric quoted above. But Kataklysm’s native language is French -- they’re from Quebec -- and when you coupled that with death metal’s distaste for any but the most tortured uses of language, figuring out what exactly they were talking about was sure to be rough going at best. |
