Before I get into this review, I want to tell you a story. A couple of months ago I was at the end of it all, from a writing perspective. I wasn’t making any money, I was burnt out, and felt that I was just banging the same drum. Music news. Music reviews. Music news. Music reviews. On and on, ad infinitum, until the sun went out. So much so in fact, that it got to the point where my weekends were becoming longer, Monday was becoming an emergency Sunday, and I was finding reasons to not write. So, I decided that enough was enough. Fuck music. Fuck writing about a scene that didn’t care enough to want itself to change. The gatekeepers could keep their gates guarded, I’d go back to shitty B-Movies, Crappy horror, and whatever else caught my mind that week. Music was out. My sanity was in.
And yet…
I kept finding myself drawn to this album. Blood Conscript by Sev Lezu. I couldn’t put it down. It became part of my daily playlist from the first moment I heard it, right in there alongside Darkthrone, Immortal, Gorgoroth, et al. It kept a spark inside me burning that just simply refused to die out. I tried to ignore it. I tried to pretend it didn’t matter or call to me in the middle of the night while I tried to sleep. I did everything except stick my fingers in my ears and yell: La La La, I’m not listening!
But it was no use.
This album had possessed me, and in doing so it made me realise that even though I had grown disillusioned with the fandom that surrounds Black/Extreme Metal, there were still bands out there who I needed to yell about at anyone dumb enough to listen to me and my waffle.
Sev Lezu are fucking amazing and Blood Conscript is an album you must own. It’s that fucking simple.
Blood Conscript is a trial by fire. Yes, it starts with the usual intro we have all become accustomed to. Yes it has a musical interlude in the shape of track six, The Ritual of Bone and Blade. But fuck me sideways with a chainsaw, this album kicks so fucking hard that you can feel your soul leave your body.
It is relentless. A physical and spiritual assault that pins you to your chair and batters you around the head with a very large, very spiky baseball bat. And the best part? You will love every second of it.
Everything about this record is designed to overwhelm you. The riffs slash at you like a serial killer on PCP. They cut through your skin with surgical precision, exposing your nerves just to apply salt to the wounds. The drums pound you to a pulp, like having a siege engine roll over your head, constantly and forever. The bass rumbles so deep that you can feel your bones turn to dust from its sheer force of will. And the vocals sound like the wind itself hates you and isn’t afraid to let you know in no uncertain terms how much it despises your very existence.
Sev Lezu are the perfect storm. A perfect storm that is bearing down on you, personally, and you can’t get out of the fucking way. Because you don’t want to.
Melissa Moore herself said about Blood Conscript:
“Me and the dolls made real black metal. The rest can fuck off and burn in hellfire.”
And there can be no denying that they have, but for me it is a bit more complicated than that.
They’ve made a fucking masterpiece. An album that needs to be listened to and owned by anyone who claims to have an interest in Black Metal. I genuinely haven’t been this affected by a debut since I first heard A Blaze in the Northern Sky. Which in itself should tell you all you need to know. And I don’t think I have ever been so affected by a record that it pulled me back from the brink of abandoning music writing altogether, just because I am convinced that if I can encourage just one person to go buy this record, then all the bullshit that goes along with this scene is worth putting up with.
You owe it to yourself to own Blood Conscript. Plain and simple.
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