rehtaF ruO - Boiled in Goat Blood

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(Originally submitted to the Metal Archives on November 14th, 2022) 

Every once in a while, you end up encountering music that leaves you bewildered and scratching your head, making you think “What was the thought process here?”. It’s not something you encounter in metal music often these days, since most subgenres, even on the avant-garde ends of the spectrum have been established to the point where there’s cliches in being experimental. rehtaF ruO, with their goofy name and their album, Boiled in Goat Blood have managed to stump me in a way I haven’t felt since my high-school, pimple-ridden self listened to Death Grips for the first time.

I’m gonna get one thing straight right off the bat. This album is incoherent, full stop. If you go into this expecting to hear anything resembling a well-structured song you’re going to walk off disappointed. Boiled in Goat Blood leaps around from hyper blasted tremolo segments to droning ambience at the drop of a hat, and there’s no rhyme or reason to these transitions. Take for example the track “Churchburner”. It starts off with a rather death metal-influenced riff that gets the blood pumping, but then out of nowhere it jumps into this bizarro blast beat that’s so absurdly fast and loud I’m almost convinced it came from a drum machine, all while there’s still something resembling an actual drumset underneath it all. Eventually it ends with the most random cymbal splashes I’ve heard in my life, as if you just let someone who didn’t know that music was being recorded hit them a few times at random intervals. That’s how the entire album flows. Things make sense one moment and the next you get a proverbial slap to the face that might as well be literal with how out of left field it is.

Yet despite how nonsensical the album is on a musical level, I find myself inexplicably drawn to it. The chaos and rawness give it a charm that I can only imagine is what people who have 30-40 years on me felt when they got their hands on first wave black metal records and demos. It takes a certain kind of mind to throw a drum machine’s hyperblast over a normal paced beat like on “Cold Black Blood Occultism”, and Urobach’s mind is just that. I don’t know how he did it but he managed to make what is at its core a wall of noise memorable despite being deathly allergic to anything resembling a hook, with one exception. “Child Sacrifice” has what is arguably the only coherent and “normal” riff on the album, a brooding doodle that ironically enough feels out of place when you look at how the band has been operating up to that point. Worry not though, things go back to incoherent growled blasting just as abruptly, and I’m all for it.

Boiled in Goat Blood also features one of the few instances where I actually don’t mind ambience. More often than not it feels like bands just put weird intermezzos in their music for the hell of it, but here it just feels right. The whole thing is just a jumbled collage of sounds that range from black metal chaos to ambient drones, and having “The Depths of Hell” right at the end just, works. Because what could possibly make any more (or less, depending on your view) sense for an album like this than for it to end with a 10-minute long haunting ambient epic? I kid you not, this is actually one of my favourite moments here because of how subdued and forlorn it is compared to what came before, and even then it’s seemingly improvised, with some random piano notes on the third half, along with Urobach’s choked rasps.

Even the production has left me absolutely baffled with how it sounds, and is frankly, a total clusterfuck. The guitars’ buzz is relatively flaccid and fluctuates in volume, more often than not getting overpowered by the dingy drums, the cymbals of which I’m wondering if they were even used barring a few moments, because if they were, I barely heard them. The vocals were the only part of the music that was audible at all times, with Urobach’s distorted, garbled rasp and growls being audible whenever they appeared, even if they were incoherent.

Truthfully, Boiled in Goat Blood is a mess, kinda like this review. It’s a release that bucks anything resembling musicality and instead of merely throwing shit at the wall and waiting to see what sticks it breaks the whole thing down. Yet, I can’t help but be charmed and attracted by how much of an imperfect anomaly it is. Urobach and Angelblood Baptizer managed to create something that, paradoxically, is coherent in its incoherence. They somehow managed to create something that feels like the metal equivalent to free jazz with how everything jumps around from one moment to the next. rehtaF ruO is definitely not for everyone, but I’d still argue it’s essential listening, despite the fact that it doesn’t fit into what one might consider “good”. It’s unique, and sometimes that’s all you need from music.

Highlights: Churchburner, Child Sacrifice, The Depths of Hell

Rating: 65%