****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I consider myself a casual fan of black metal. I have a begrudging respect for some of its main practitioners, but my main listening interests lie within the thrash and doom metal realms.With the release of The Work Which Transforms God in 2003, France's Blut Aus Nord started to generate an insane amount of buzz around underground metal circles, due mostly to their creativity and desire to push the often restrictive boundaries of said genre.As time went by, the album became a bona fide heavy metal classic, rearing its ugly head in every single metal related site best of the decade list by 2010, so finally, after years of beating around the bush I finally decided leave my comfort zones and check for myself if the hype was actually justified, and boy was I surprised: this is one of the rare black metal albums I can recommend without any reservations to any true extreme heavy metal fan.With this pivotal release, Blut Aus Nord managed to leave behind black metal's stale traditionalism and create truly futuristic, otherworldly music without becoming a lame techno nightmare like Samael, Ulver or The Kovenant, an indie-worshipping shoegaze band like Alcest, Agalloch and Wolves in the Throne Room, or a pretentious overblown mess like Deathspell Omega or The Meads of Asphodel.It's very difficult to describe just how unique this album sounds. Aside from the expected raspy black metal vocals, the music contained on this disc features a very dissonant and oddly tone-warped guitar sound combined with complex programmed drums. The harsher moments are surrounded by frequent ambient interludes, while song tempos can range from full blasting speed to an almost droning doom feel.In fact, comparing The Work Which Transforms God to other avant-garde black metal oeuvres is almost pointless, since the only band that may sound similar to this album is Godflesh on its early Streetcleaner period. True, the latter never reached the speed or variation the former offers here, but the atmosphere both bands create is ultimately the same: dark, bleak, dreadfully haunting and inhumanly mechanical, yet irresistibly alluring at the same time. See, while most avant-garde black metal bands try every single trick in the book to sound weird and disturbing, Blut Aus Nord achieved a truly alien and otherworldly sound without even trying... much like Godflesh did with Streetcleaner in 1989.In closing, if you're even mildly interested in extreme metal on any form, stop wasting your time reading this review and get this classic as soon as you can. This is one of the undeniable, quintessential heavy metal masterpieces of the 21st century's first decade and an essential album that has been universally praised by fans, musicians, and critics both in and out of the underground metal scene.Candlelight records reissued this album in 2005 with the Thematic Emanation of Archetypal Multiplicity EP added as a bonus CD, get that edition if you can.
