Scribed by Sandre the Giant
Now, this might be technically cheating as ‘The Work Which Transforms God’ was originally released in 2003 through a small French independent label, Appease Me Records, but the 2004 May release through Candlelight Records really gave Blut Aus Nord the platform to reach the fans who needed them. A transformative force in the direction of black metal throughout the 2000s, the mysterious French collective have released many albums that have redefined how black metal can sound, and many believe this to be their magnum opus. This is the 20th anniversary of its release.
Myself, I’m tied on that one. I discovered the band on ‘MoRT’, a much more industrial and dark ambient version of their sound, and it has always held a soft spot in my cold dead heart, but ‘The Work Which Transforms God’ is an album that flirts with the very peaks of black metal’s works. It was also the record that really put them front and centre on the stage of experimental black metal, full of uncomfortable atonal tracks that challenge the core perceptions of what black metal can sound like . Take ‘The Choir of the Dead’ for example, scathing vocals meet mind bending guitars and alien drumming; an atonal psychedelic trip through the darkess recesses and voids of the human psyche. Everything about it is uncomfortable, avantgarde, and with barely any connection to what we would understand as black metal in the early 2000s. The introduction of dark, industrial elements into the nihilistic grip of black metal’s pioneers was something that Thorns had tried a few years before but it hadn’t caught on in the same way. There’s still burning tremolo riffs and blastbeats (‘The Supreme Abstract’), but it comes at you with some kind of interdimensional angularity and nothing feels comfortable. A world built on ‘Transilvanian Hunger’ and ‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’ was not ready for the likes of the Godfleshian, blackened nightmare of closer ‘Procession of the Dead Clowns’.
A band whose work has been monolithic in its influence over the avantgarde influence in modern extreme music, much like the likes of Godflesh were years before to the integration of the industrial into metal, as well as the evolution of black metal’s sound to the point of potentially saving it from repetitive redundancy. There was no room for the corpse painted, Satanic hordes in the world of Blut Aus Nord, just devastatingly alien sounding art from places beyond our comprehension. The lyrics for ‘The Work Which Transforms God’ have never been officially released, but if the music sounds like this, imagine how dark and beyond mortal comprehension those words are…
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The Killchain 