Krieg Blut Ehre Asche (das ist ‘War Blood Honour Ashes’ in Englisch!) is the debut release from a NDE, a Belgian duo who are too kvlt to have anything so vulgar as a website or MySpace page (the address given below is a fan page), or even to divulge their identities – they’re known only as K and B. NDE presumably stands for Near-Death Experience, though it could equally well be Nose-Draining Equipment for all I know. The cover art isn’t giving much away either – gloomy monochrome images of a ghostly robed and cowled monk standing amongst crumbling stone ruins overlaid with some cryptic inscribed texts, but nothing in the way of recording info, or even any track titles – it’s simply Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Parts I-VII, and that’s your lot.

So with the idle chit-chat over, all that’s left is to listen to the album, and that turns out to be an intensely harrowing 38-minute excursion into the stygian bowels of some of the darkest death industrial / black metal crossover material you’ll ever hear. Part I opens with a sonorous barrage of drums, resonating through the void like the doors of Hell slamming shut behind you, picking up momentum into a regular, monotonous beat behind dreary, ritualistic chanting and eardrum-shredding blackened growls for a couple of minutes, before exploding around the four-minute mark into fearsomely raw, necro black metal, something like early Darkthrone, with the incessant jackhammer beats and hideous production values that go with the territory. Anyone who’s into extremist, outsider black metal acts such as Striborg, Emit or Leviathan will lap this evilness up – others may well shrink from it in terror. Part II shifts back into death industrial mode, with huge compressed beats detonating behind doomy metallic clangs like the weaponry forges of the Uruk-Hai, more multi-tracked, tortured vocals, and buzzing, corrosive atmospherics, terminating in a malevolent melodic flourish, before Part III delivers a hideous toxic amalgam of distorted black metal guitars, a surging, gothic keyboard line and hard industrial beats. This combination in particular reminds me of Antipodean antichrist Nekrasov, or some of Nordvargr’s output under the Vargr project banner.

Part IV dispenses with metal guitars in favour of multiple layers of wailing vocals and militant beats, but the album reaches its high point, or low point if you prefer, on Parts V and VI, as eerie gothic keyboards, thunderous orchestrations and soaring soprano choral chants are ripped into by vocals as vicious and snarling as a pack of starving wolves and a fast, tinny programmed beat. There’s a little more space to breathe on these tracks, they’re more melodic and not quite as frenetically noisy as the earlier part of the album, but they carry a huge payload of poisonous potency, especially Part V. Krieg Blut Ehre Asche delivers its coup de grace with Part VII, which features the album’s most intolerably incessant programmed beat amid rusty blood-spattered shards of feedback and more of those possessed vocals, ending with a confused cacophony of howls and screams. After that, there’s an uncredited eighth track, which reverts back to a more or less straightforward necro black metal template.

It should be obvious from the above that only hardened veterans of musical extremity should go anywhere near NDE, but paradoxically for such an awesomely harsh release, NDE possess considerable crossover appeal, operating as they do at the intersection of black metal, death industrial, noise and even a hint of martial industrial, although anyone who can’t at least tolerate really nasty, raw black metal is going to find this album a really daunting proposition. And whilst there are some really dark, morbid atmospheres on Krieg Blut Ehre Asche, it’s just too frenetic and noisy to really pass for dark ambient – I mention this because it’s possible that the cover art might deceive some into thinking that this is a dark ambient release. Those looking for some really cutting-edge extreme music as we enter the second decade of the 21 century, though, won’t go far wrong with NDE.

www.myspace.com/voidofhatende

www.coldspring.co.uk

www.myspace.com/coldspring