After listening to American Black Metallers Xasthur’s Subliminal Genocide full length offering, I have only one question to ask; why the fuck is this popular? Being a huge fan of goregrind I’m used to terrible production, in fact, I’ve come to learn, and accept, that for certain types of music the worst the production happens to be, the better the material sounds. If Disgorge (mex)’s Forensick had a clean production it probably wouldn’t be as powerful an album as it is.

Subliminal Genocide however, is plagued with terrible production seemingly for the sake of being "dark and evil." Being dark and evil is fine, but when the production is so raw it sounds like a box full of bumblebees being shaken in front of a fan while someone shrieks with the volume set to the lowest level possible it comes across as a wall of noise.

When the guitar tone is audible the material isn’t bad, simplistic slow-paced riffs, with simple slow-paced drum patterns and simple synths. In essence, this is just a sped up version of a generic doom recording with high pitched shrieking vocals and typical fucking-awful production values.

I can’t really comment on the quality of the material, because it’s so distorted and annoying I can’t sit through listening to the entire album beginning to end more than once. Even as background noise this is some pretty awful shit.

I know this band is highly regarded among underground black metal fans. I’ve heard it referred to as "suicidal black metal" and I understand why; if I was forced to listen to this album more than once I’d probably slit my wrists while drinking Draino. Fuck this awful, even for shitty "raw" black metal.

Written By: Teufel