There are crazy bands and then there are bands that throw logic out the window with the fucking baby. They twist sounds out of their instruments that sound like screaming robots one minute and then erupt into mindgasms that show the limits of electronics shattered one note at a time.

Enough hysterical talk aside, Furze is Cosmic Black Metal on the scale of Deathspell Omega, Ruins of Beverast, Trelldom and Teitanblood. My first exposure was their seminal release from 2007 UTD, I remember getting it at a mega-bookstore of all places and I loved it immediately. The psychotic meeting of the psychedelic slamming headfirst into Black Metal Jazz blew my mind.

However they fell off my radar until 2018’s The Presence which was a complex album, but then each Furze release is an experimental phenomenon of what psychotic Black Metal with some DSBM crawling chaos can be.

It starts with an “Intro” that just gets you ready to have your virgin pineal gland opened and fucked sideways because second track “    Beautiful Living on the Left Hand Path of Death” drops your pitiful soul into a deep pit and I mean your subconscious doesn’t stand a chance. The guitars are barely restrained into making cohesive chords while the drums play whack a mole to keep things going. To the average listener it would sound like the solar winds set to music, but I fucking love it.

“Cosmic Stimulation of Dark Fantasies” has a creeping intro before the real mind fucking begins. This gutted corpse of a track starts with a bouncing, absolutely sick riff, that quickly grows into a twisting and turning black serpent with devastating venom. There’s some relentless blasting going on in between the thrashy bits; this might be the fastest song on the album.

“Caw Entrance” is described as a ballad in the presser… ok, I’ll play along. This track has some of the strangest vocals I have ever heard, Woe J. Reaper tries really hard with the high, clean-gruff vocals; hitting some strange and off-kilter high notes. If this was any other album or genre they would certainly not work, but here they work out like the screams of the damned. “Waswasah” continues with the clean vocals, although here they’re more annunciated and maybe understandable. Musically it’s a doom laden flesh and bone dungeon crawler. Sort of Black Sabbath-ish but then there’s that crooning, and it’s suitable to the music’s mournful feeling.

“Marrow Creed” is the final track and it starts with some phased bass lines that are mind twisting.  Some of you may remember the part in Spinal Tap where the bassist goes in a prog direction? That is  “Marrow Creed” in a nutshell. It just meanders around that rolling bass line. It’s a weird as fuck ending to a weird as fuck album.

Yet, I still love it’s presentation; it’s avant-garde to the absolute maximum level, it’s not for everyone and the ones who write it off will do so without fully embracing the strangeness and chaos that Furze create. Cosmic Stimulation of Dark Fantasies is for those odd fuckers (like me) that love Oranssi Pazuzu, Teitanblood, Ruins of Beverast and Deathspell Omega. It’s deadly Black Metal that you should check out.

 

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