‘The Sacred Truth’ by Tenhornedbeast [CSR77CD]

HAVING previously reviewed ‘Ten Horns, Ten Stars’ (2004) and ‘Woe to You Oh Earth and Sea’ (2005), I was naturally pleased to obtain Christopher Walton’s latest album. But whereas the first two recordings had been self-released, on this occasion Chris has rightly been taken under the wing of a major Industrial label with the kind of distribution and promotion that he deserves. The deep-brown digipak shows a hooded man wielding the skull and antlers of a stag. Between the horns there hovers a ten-pointed star, similar perhaps to the colourfully-tessellated mosaics that often appear in Islamic art. The same varnished symbol appears on the CD itself. But whilst the imagery surrounding this project tends to suggest that a strong Occult theme is at work just beneath the surface, Chris is a defiantly solitary and uncompromising figure who has insisted elsewhere that his latest opus is considerably less ‘magickal’ than the kind of material that he and Stephen Pennick were producing back in their Endura days. More importantly, however, ‘The Sacred Truth’ seems committed to both engendering and putting forward a radical musical concept that stands decidedly against the shallow values of the modern age. With five tracks and sixty-five minutes of aural experimentation, Tenhornedbeast once again transcends the boundaries of sound. The early moments of ‘Oppression Sacrament’ are gently disturbing. Menacing groans and metallic energy jostle for space in the black heart of a Chthonic sermon. These are the incomprehensible mantras you would hear if you stumbled upon a diabolical ritual held in the tomb-strewn environs of a deserted churchyard, far away from the bourgeois safety-zone that characterises the glittering transience of the West in the twenty-first century. The darkly-religious theme seems to continue with ‘Our Lady of the Lightning Bolt’, not an ode to Diana Mosley but a tubular rush with perpetual ambient synths and an approaching drone that rumbles like a juggernaut in an underpass. The sound always threatens to become more extreme and does so occasionally with hard-edged swathes that increase the overall tension. Some of them wobble and shimmer in a psychedelic dronefest of pitches and wails, as the thin line between dark ambient and noise is finally bridged. The sentiments in the title ‘Strength Through Fear’ sound rather more accurate than the old Third Reich adage and this tuneful dirge sounds like somebody attempting to play an electric guitar with a cello bow. Behind it all, conducted with a terrifying speed, is a massive cacophony of feedback and electronic chaos. The track is filled with a constant oscillation, like someone rattling a metal spoon on the bars of a cage. The deranged frenzy of ‘In the Teeth of a Wolf’ is like the soundtrack to Dante’s ‘Inferno’ and contains a brutal mercilessness with little time for sentimentality. Grating riffs are unleashed like a chainsaw against a stone pillar; nerves are assailed by steel aural blades forged with an assiduous violence; and sometimes the velocity hastens and slows erratically. Tenhornedbeast’s style constantly evokes images of sunken pools and subterranean chambers. There is nothing solar or Apollonian about Chris Walton’s work and this album - even more so than its predecessors - is staunchly Dionysian in its nightmarish attempts to portray the darker side of human nature. A nature, perhaps, that in times of necessity should entirely transcend contractual laws of contemporary society and be deployed against other humans in order to readdress the natural order. The weak, it is inferred, become fuel for the strong. ‘Christus Nox’, meaning Christ Night, begins in more of a restrained fashion. The doom-laden riffs are there once again, but this time they add a strange gothic-ambience that replaces the devastating dissonance of the previous tracks with a more recognisable structure. Such is the cold minimalism on offer that if a few screaming vocals and frenetic drumbeats were added this would sound like a Burzum track. I really love the claustrophobic atmosphere used here, I think it’s something decidedly ‘northern’, and by that I mean North European. ‘A Sacred Truth’, then, is a brilliant release. Man the eternal predator waits on the periphery like a snarling psychopath, only this time he is wearing headphones and listening to Tenhornedbeast.