I’ll be honest, the French (Canadian) spelling of the word ‘nuclear’ is about as threatening as George W. Bush’s ‘nucular’. Also, when you title your album Unrelenting Fucking Hatred, that sets all kinds of warning signs that this is not going to be particularly original. However, given that this project was started by Lord Worm of Cryptopsy a few years after he recorded None So Vile, it was worth a listen.

At first, this is about what I expected from an album with a bombed-out city for its cover art – air raid sirens, martial drumming, and grimy, corroded guitars like coils of barbed wire. And then Lord Worm’s vocals come in – harsh, industrialized grind-shrieks, like a virus-riddled cyborg. The yowling, maniacal delivery is pure Anaal Nathrakh, but the insectoid buzz, on the verge of degrading and breaking up into static, is just different enough to add that je ne sais quoi. However, it’s the music and melodies that are the real surprise here. Given the dystopian, post-apocalyptic concept and the caustic vocals, I expected something along the lines of The Amenta or even Ministry, and yet what we have here sounds more like mid-to-late 90s melodic black metal.

The pace is relentless and the drumming is clinical and mechanized, but the synth choral voices that lay the foundation in tracks like the creatively-titled “Hunt with Murderworms, Sculpt with Flies” or “The Sorrow Children at Morningside” could be Shadowthrone-era Satyricon, or something off the first Old Man’s Child album. And it’s not just those choral effects either – the repeating, streamlined and blackened melodies throughout the album recall other bands as well. From the moans and dirge-like cycles of “Endziel,” I get Windir, like something off of 1184. From “30 Seconds in the Killhouse” or “Fields of the Crucified,” it’s Thy Serpent. After returning to the press notes, I saw that the band references Mysticum, a little-known band from the mid 90’s who also had a pounding, industrialized feel to complement their cold, frigid melodies. And so there you have what appears to be the chief inspiration for this odd hybrid.

As the album hurtles by, it’s both enjoyable and somewhat familiar, though those vocals – occasionally deteriorating to little more than vomited barks – disrupt the nostalgia just enough so that the experience is not completely derivative. Still, remove the dystopian, mechanized vibe, the shouted German samples and those Insecticon shrieks and barks, and you’re left with a decent blasting black metal album that’s more melodic than your average Marduk war-metal blitzkrieg. And compared with Anaal Nathrakh’s mastery of pacing, composition, and terrifying majesty as well as full-on annihilation, Rage Nucléaire comes off as merely relentless. In other words, both the T-800 and T-1000 will hunt you down and reduce you to a smear in time, but one of them will do it with a far more deadly and devious arsenal.

[Visit the band's website]

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