Black Fucking Cancer – Black Fucking Cancer (Review)

This is the début album from Black Fucking Cancer, a US black metal band.

Due to the name of this band I was expecting short, punky, excrement-filled black metal lasting probably no longer than about 20 minutes. What we actually get is a full 60 minutes of hate-powered misanthropy and perversion, courtesy of these blackened maniacs.

This is ugly music that the band manage to stretch out to longer-than-usual lengths. What do they do with this extra time? Well, where other bands might explore different aspects of their sound or experiment with various sub-styles, Black Fucking Cancer just fill the space with more of the same degenerate black metal, foaming at the mouth and ready to kill.

These songs are fast, rhythmic and utterly without mercy or shades of light. With a raw, sharp recording, the album clatters and burns its way out of the speakers; the band watch from the sidelines as their creation seemingly takes on a destructive life of its own.

Okay, okay, hyperbole, aside; there is more going on here than just rabid black metal. If there wasn’t, a release of this length would get very boring, very fast. Black Fucking Cancer are more than happy with their theme of nasty, misanthropic black metal, but within this self-imposed limitation they expose all of their ugly side with great relish, be that fast, slow or anywhere in between.

If you combine early Darkthrone with early 1349, add a touch of chaos from the likes of Watchmaker and Black Witchery, include a bit of early Anaal Nathrakh‘s cold hatred, and then cover everything in acidic vomit, you’ll have a good idea of where Black Fucking Cancer are coming from. In some places it also reminds me of the amazing Weakling, which is very high praise indeed.

And do you know what? It really fucking works. I haven’t heard anything quite this relentlessly bile-ridden in quite some time. Lengthy though it is, this album succeeds more often than it fails.

I, for one, salute our new blast beat wielding masters.