There are a lot of avant-garde, sonically adventurous black metal bands coming out of France these days. Merrimack is not one of them. Proudly atavistic and committed to the musical aesthetic pioneered by Darkthrone, Satyricon, et al., their latest full-length offers an hour of unrelenting fuzzy guitars, ultra-harsh vocals, crisp, non-reverbed drums, and a Satanic/anti-Christian outlook. If you think there's not enough of this stuff in the world already, well then, you're probably gonna like this record, because Merrimack (named for a word meaning "infinite depths/abyss" in old Celtic, not for the New Hampshire town or the Civil War ironclad battleship) keep it old-school. Blastbeats, buzzy riffs, unhinged howling. There are some nice thrashy riffs recalling Hellhammer that crop up from time to time, but otherwise, they're just wandering the frosty wasteland from first note to last, with little variation between tracks. And in a world where Immortal, Marduk, and Mayhem are still putting out records, and the latter two are stretching the boundaries of their genre, there's not much point to a proudly unevolved album like this one beyond mere stubbornness.
© Phil Freeman /TiVo