And so you’ve got your Aura Noir -- a Norwegian band who, on Increased Damnation, come up with some of the best song titles you’re going to get for your metal buck (“Towers of Limbs and Fevers,” “Broth of Oblivion,” and the timeless “Wretched Face of Evil”: any one of these would all by itself make an excellent T-shirt) and back up the titles with a two-for-one combination of black metal and thrash metal that’s -- can I say it? -- downright cute in its clenched-teeth dedication to ruling its way-off-in-the-corner-of-the-barnyard-amidst-the-skulls-and-bones roost. In the black metal world, they’re no secret at all: they’re sort of a supergroup, their members all having active other projects. Playing into our recent obsession with collections of previously released material, Increased Damnation compiles an impossible-to-find first album and some unreleased stuff (demos and practice tapes: if you’ve got any collector-fetishist in you at all, this album should wind you up like an alarm clock) and wastes no time flattening everything within a two-mile radius of your stereo. Its weapon? The same ones nature’s been using since the invention of the multicellular organism: diversity and brute strength. |