Staff Reviews

Årabrot - The Gospel

Review by Benjamin Bland

Årabrot’s most compulsively playable record to date»

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Seventh album from these ever-changing and undefinable pioneers. The new album marks a new direction in the band's evolution, now more towards post-punk and industrial. Think Killing Joke, Swans, The Fall, PiL, Stranglers. Feat. appearances from Stephen O'Malley (SunnO)))), Ted Parsons (Killing Joke, Prong), Andrew Liles (Current93/Nurse With Wound) and Erlend Hjelvik (Kvelertak). Recorded at Electrical Audio by Steve Albini in Chicago Summer 2015. Sired in the post-punk, body-horror screeds of bands such as The Birthday Party and Jesus Lizard, and taking Melvins' stewed-to-a-pulp stomp as smelling salts, Arabrot have developed their own perverse strain of skin-crawling art-rock over six albums and numerous EPs, releases such as 2011's Solar Anus and 2015's You Bunch Of Idiots. Mixing in elements of black metal, and a love of really really dirty, if philosophical French writers such as George Bataille and the Marquis de Sade - all have had the effect opening up a stye-ridden third eye. Having already once suffered a collapsed lung during a show in London, frontman Kjetil Nernes discovered a malignant cancer growth in his throat, and now given the all-clear, The Gospel is a tale of near-death and rebirth. As Kjetil himself says: "The theme of The Gospel is a vision of the lonely warrior on a summit looking out over a battle field, the smoke from the bomb craters, an all-encompassing silence. The war was against one self; against the ugliness, against the sickness. You sink to the bottom of the sea. All of a sudden you are back on the surface again, stupefied. And hungry! A wicked hunger for everything human life has to offer: Sex! War! Drugs! You breathe, but not like before. 'The man who has been in hell, never forget'.
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