This is NOT blackmetal. This is ethnoincorporoprognoire Europa. Unfamiliar? Imagine Therion and Gorguts fisticuffing it out for the main stage at a NAMBLA meeting. Blackmetal makes you wanna varneline churches, stab gothy posers, carve indecipherable Norse-like runes in your flesh, and scream "Kill for Satan!" This stuff just makes you wanna turn it off, take a crap and read back issues of Pit mag. First of all, Martin Schirenc is not a musician: he’s a conceptualist. Pungent Stench was a concept-band. I bought (or stole, actually) Pungent Stench albums for the blood-drenched geni-grinders in the vagina-miner sado-suits; not the music. (Can you name a half-dozen good Pungent Stench songs?) So if the concept (i.e., overproduced "black" [I use this term loosely] metal w/ lots of cheesy chanting & quasi-classical elements) SUCKS, the band/album will must likely blow incredibly hard, as Hollenthon and Domus Mundi do. What I truly get a kick out of (besides the crappy avantgarde music) are the Anders Friden-esque, nonsensical, in-English lyrics: a series of a awkward metaphors and uncomplimentary word combinations that would get you a low but solid D in a a dactyllic-hexametric Homeric poetry class (stick to the German, guys.) There’s even an interpolation of a Percy Bysshe Shelley poem: what wordsmiths. Hollenthon and their offering boil down to little more than Stratovarius and Paradise Lost gratifying one another at a Eurotrash peep show as Jesper Stomblad looks on in ecstasy. The only thing REMOTELY enjoyable are the belched Pungent Stench-vocals (even these are toned-down and used sparingly) that will make Stencheadz yearn to have the Musical Assassins back. But Pungenitalia take heart: Schirenc has two other projects in the works, Mudbreed (reputed sludgy hardcore) and Kreuzweg Ost (reputed industrial darktech implementing WWII artillery fire as percussion.) Hopefully Marty Martin Schirenc’s got all that retarded art-metal crap out of his system and is ready to give us sumthin ta fuckin blast - but probably not.

Written By: Nameless Dread