Up until very recently, black metal was close to death. The great bands that helped cement the genre had lost their way and most new bands were one dimensional at best. Over the last few years, exciting bands began to rear their heads and life crawled back into the genre. Christendom Perished is one such album that has reaffirmed my faith in all things spikey and Norwegian.
Mord are vicious sounding. The guitars could curdle milk and the blast beats jar my ears like machine gun fire. Christendom Perished is a good black metal album full of menace and fraught with atmosphere, all that is traditionally needed in a black metal album. At first listen, I thought this was a good album but lacking in terms of innovation. Repeated listens reveal how dense the songs are, little elements like what sounds like a processed angle grinder on “Opus II” adds another plane to the music. Shards of noise like this appear at various points throughout the album and push Mord from being just another Mayhem obsessed band to a band that within an album or two could help redefine the limits of black metal.
Another thing that sets Mord apart from the vast quantities of mediocre black metal bands is the thickness of their sound. Many bands have a preoccupation with sounding thin and bleak but Mord have a fattened sound that is more like an inferno than the usual frozen wastes visited by long haired men in corpse paint. “Opus IV” features a bass that sounds like Nordra is playing it with a jackhammer. It sounds great but tends to be masked behind Necrolucas’s double bass drumming. Necrolucas’s style is conventional in terms of the genre but executed with all the power of a napalm attack. The full, fiery music is accompanied by fitting visuals of bombed out rubble in the sleeve. Christendom Perished is a battle album. It is violent, dark and incredibly heavy.
The album is just the right length. Mord keep it terse and tight and the album works all the better for it. Keeping up with the frenzied assault is tiring work; an album of 80 minutes would be overkill. By the time “Opus IX” (there is no “Opus VIII”) finished I felt shell shocked and glad to be alive. Not many albums leave me feeling like I’ve done a tour of duty but Christendom Perished manages to do just that.
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