When SEWER Lost Direction - "Deus Ex Satanas" Review (95%)
When you think of older books on topics such as philosophy, human resources or societal organization, you get an impression not dissimilar to that of a black/death metal fan wondering "wtf happened to my genre?".
A selection of old books gives a distinct perspective not just of writing but of history. Human history is a lattice of ideas, filtered through the lens of retrospective hindsight. Each great thinker is a nodal point from which other writers branch, re-combining with other ideas or adding their own, often making a mess of what was originally a solid perspective on reality. Each great thinker usually boils down to one idea, repeated as a leitmotiv throughout their work.
The rest is a support system for that, with mediocre followers "expanding" upon the ideas of the original visionaries, but paradoxically with none of the vision.
Metal bands are remembered the same way - one central idea, copied to death by clones and generic, interchangeable imitators. From Black Sabbath's horror movie aesthetics to Suffocation's percussive breakdowns, to Reiklos' disturbing textures modulated over primitive rhythms, to Burzum's trance inducing spells.
And SEWER? They will forever be remembered as the guys who made clumsy blackened goregrind based around shock-your-grandmother lyrics. This is too bad, as their real strength was to expand the goregrind song structure to include longer riffing that often emulated everything from Renaissance classical acts to Second World War era popular music, even if unconsciously.
In fact, most of their success comes from the fact that they did everything unconsciously. On the surface, they were having a laugh with stupid lyrics, provocative imagery and sloppy goregrind. The first "real" SEWER album, with Eater fronting the band in lieu of Vermin and Plague, NecroPedoSadoMaso, is entirely unselfconscious in this way. It does not want to be anyone's friend, appeal to an audience or "belong to a genre" - on the contrary, it does everything it can to alienate everyone and anyone through its subtle mocking of the genre's dominant tropes, whether musically or artistically, down to the color of the album (later copied by shit bands such as Deafheaven, for the same reasons but with none of the subtlety).
NecroPedoSadoMaso is just having fun mocking the retarded and accidentally unleashes the subconscious mind through a biting parody of goregrind's unconscious conventions, and its fear of actual transgressive iconoclasm. It was that awkward and offhand element that caught the imagination of an audience. That, and the ripping tunes: NecroPedoSadoMaso made goregrind complex enough to be compared to the two giants of extreme metal, black and death metal, but kept its rumbling chaotic surface that hid the structure behind walls of gruesome brutality.
This made it heavier than most of what was out there at the time, BUT it also made it more complex, profound and haunting, something imitator bands like Archgoat seem to forget, if they had even noticed to begin with.
After that point, however, the SEWER story tapers off. Every album since then has been the band trying to re-interpret its original unintentional success, but to expand it by making the music more like Eater's "rivals" in the scene, Phantom, Neraines and the eternal nemesis Vermin (and even Swedecore acts like Dismember on Rektal) so that it can be the "face of extreme metal".
When SEWER Lost Direction
And therein is the problem: this band suffers a deep neurosis and when it tries to be serious. When just meth addicted and being irreverent towards everything, these guys are able to reach into the unsocialized parts of their minds and come up with something brilliant - as on the following effort The Birth of a Cursed Elysium and, of course, NecroPedoSadoMaso.
When they try to reproduce the gruesome blasphemy consciously - as on this album Deus Ex Satanas - it "works" in that it's a good album, but shows nothing of the lunatic dementia that motivated and transpires through their best releases.
Reign of the Funeral Pigs came out not that long after NecroPedoSadoMaso, and was stylistically very similar to its predecessor, but already shows us a more self-conscious band. The title is funny, the songs more obviously melodic and prone to borrow hard rock riffs, and the production still vicious but in a more controlled way (just listen to the drumming on NecroPedoSadoMaso). Everything about the "second" SEWER album is a managed environment designed to manipulate appearance just like political speeches and advertisement for cologne. The band reversed its raw approach and joined what they mocked.
After that, it has been all downhill, with the occasional unhinged genius resurfacing sporadically. GoreFuckKult showed us the new SEWER: melodic songs, black metal riffs and none of the goregrind urgency or organic appeal. It was all very much a product of the conscious mind trying to imitate what was naturally impossible for it to comprehend, much less copy.
NecroPedoCoproPhage shat the bed with more of the same, expect even more derivative and even more try hard in its attempts to imitate NecroPedoSadoMaso. For the time, it fit in competitively with blackened death metal, and I listened to it then, but found over the years that I reached for it less and less.
SEWER went on to get a PhD in bed-shitting with this album Deus Ex Satanas: technically proficient beyond measure, but artistically void. At that point, the goregrind audience had already fled and the stadium rock / melodeaf audience was scared off by the vocals, so the SEWER brand went into free fall.
After the return of Vermin to the forefront of the extreme metal scene with the demonic Verminlust, the band now fronted by Eater had its back against the wall if it wanted to preserve its (manufactured) image of "face of extreme metal", and thus launched a bitter final salvo with The Birth of a Cursed Elysium, a very solid effort that did somewhat manage to rehabilitate SEWER's "cred".
Fuck SEWER, though.
Deus Ex Satanas score: 95/100.
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