When we last featured Swedish industrial post-punk rockers THE BELOW, in November, it was as a video release and I couldn’t avoid doing it again with this pleasant little spring lamb, Easter Egg, Jesus loves you ditty which took me back joyfully to my Cold War childhood and the 13 Days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It is particularly appropriate today when we learn that the British government is intending to introduce conscription because of the perceived threat from Vlad and his chums over there in Москва, to review a track (it is from the album ‘Immutable behaviour’ which was released on 28th February), that deals with Armageddon.
Specifically, in some cultures, vampires are believed to be blood-drinking human monsters who do not cast shadows, perhaps as a manifestation of their lack of a soul. However, they say, isn’t it even more monstrous when a shadow remains but the human has gone missing?
Hence ‘Hitobito’ (Japanese for ‘Only the Shadows’) “is a haunting, foreboding track based on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the shadows of the victims were etched into stone.” Yep, I reckon most of us at one time or another has seen those pictures that tell you better than anything else what nuclear fission sponsored annihilation looks like.
You really need to be in the right frame of mind to watch and listen to this, I’m not kidding. It genuinely is a case of ‘don’t have nightmares’ as Jill Dando used to say on Crimewatch.
Musically, the essence of despair is unrelenting right from the start until its conclusion almost six minutes later, from the initial (and endlessly repeating) explosions to the thunderous, doom laden, random percussion infused synthesised sound of a typical day in Purgatory.
It might be the sound of a steel factory somewhere amongst the Nine Circles of Hell where they make rods for the back of the entire Human Race.
The voiceover is straight out of War of the Worlds and the choral chants might be led by Beelzebub himself (alt. pronouns her/she/it).
Visually, it’s what you might expect to see walking through Oldham on any regular day from the POV of someone who has OD’d on fentanyl.
From the kaleidoscopic effects; to what looks like a sinister Halloween pumpkin cavorting on its axis (later returning in the form of a hooded monk or clock face – your call); to the barefoot survivors exiting en masse; to the manically wandering eyeballs; to the clouds that spawn snakes; to what looks like ‘the choppers’ from Galaxy Quest; to the theatrical death masks; to the out of control clocks (I’m surprised they didn’t stop at 0815 when the Hiroshima bomb exploded, or at one minute to midnight); to the egg timer about to suffocate its human inhabitant; to its light bulb, Deaths head wasps; to its exploding planets; to the horn-locked creatures that resemble a working oil rig…
…all of it guaranteed to scare the poor reviewer to a safe place behind the couch or beneath the sheets, and that’s where I’m going right now…
…I love it.
I wonder what they do when they’re having a bad hair day.
Don’t have nightmares.
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