BE PERSECUTED "I.I" CD

I love black metal. I've said it before, i know, but it bears reiteration. Black metal is one of the few genres where bands can write and rewrite the same riffs over and over again and still have it come out sounding amazing and original. It's the familiarity and the knowledge that some tried and true chord progressions just don't get old. And that brings us to this opus from China's Be Persecuted, unleashing their extremely noisy brand of BM on unsuspecting ears. China isn't very well known as a solace for BM acts, i can really only think of a handful, and for some reason they're all super noisy, more so than the average BM album. It's like there's an extra chromosome of aggression in Chinese BM bands and the result ends up being tremendously razor-esque recordings of above average harshness. All this blends in well with Be Persecuted's approach to the dark arts, a very mournful, surprisingly melodic take on the black metal form that doesn't really bring anything new to the table but does an amazing job of working within the set paarameters and crafting an album of epic sorrows and truly mournful sound. The obvious influence here is Burzum and lots of it-Varg wrote all these riffs years ago in some form or another and BP doesn't seem to mind throwing open the vaults and plundering the musical riches inside. Even the guitars sound amazingly Burzumic, albeit a bit more chaotic but totally fuzzed out and almost incomprehensible. The vocals are super extreme, which is great, definetely along the lines of the mighty Urfaust or Silencer, creating windy howls and pained banshee wails over the wall of fuzz torture. The riffs are reptetitive and cyclical and the whole records ends up becoming very very hypnotic and mesmerizing, which is one of my favorite things about black metal. You almost approach a drone, a zen place of hurt and aggression. The only thing that suffers hear is the lyrics, i can't tell if they're sung in English or Chinese but they're all printed in English in the books and due to translation problems they make almost zero sense. But i have to say, i haven't run across many better song titles this year than "Resented for Livelihood." Hilarious. Lyrical confusion aside, this is a great record, it is one that i feel will certainly grown on me, and i hope to hear more from Be Persecuted in the future. it'll be interesting to see how they evolve beyond the Burzum worship, or if they don't, how they continue to work off the formulae and ideas.