Album Review: Sodomic Baptism - Contra Christum
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
“Sodomic Baptism”. From there, I arrive at sodomy. It’s interesting in a way that sodomy has such unholy connotations. I can remember my first explorations of it. A girl I was hanging out with asked if I would like to try some butt stuff. “Hell yes” I replied with knee-slapping enthusiasm. 10 minutes later I was bent over with a hairbrush...shall we say, “installed”, somewhat confused but not unhappy with the situation. I don’t recall it being an especially sacrilegious experience. No barons of Hades’ lava-veined plains manifested to bear witness, no hails from any sulphurous denizens of the netherworld, no visit from Beelzebub yelling “I heard you were doing arse stuff, I came as fast as I c...is that a hairbrush?”. Yet still does the unsavoury pall of devilry hang over the apparently blasphemous proposition of rectum spelunking. At the very mention of it, Christ shakes his head, averts his eyes, and God ponders flooding the earth once more.
The band (Sodomic Baptism) comes from Belarus, home of other such dealers of death as Relics of Humanity and Extermination Dismemberment. And so, seeking enlightenment regarding the ungodly nature of buggery, I asked an acquaintance with property in Belarus if they knew of a Sodomic Baptism. Once the police had stopped beating me, I found myself bruised, abused, and no less bemused, seemingly doomed to forever pondering the heretical reputation of the back door. Alas, then, I cannot clarify anything around that particular line of enquiry. But I can at least tell you whether Sodomic Baptism are any good.
They’re...o.k? Hearty. Chunky. I don’t know anything about Belarusian cuisine, but whatever their default preparation for meat and potatoes is, this album is the equivalent. Borscht maybe? This is borscht metal, for better or worse, and regrettably enough I found that while listening to it the flaws were more prone to spring out at me than were the merits. For one thing, it suffers from repetition and therefore a degree of redundancy. There are riffs here that are the spitting images of each other, borderline monozygotic twins – listen to “Posthumous Rebirth” “The Witches Laughter” and “Belial. The Path to Knowledge” and you’ll hear it – this distinctive pattern based around iterations of open string, first fret, open string, first fret, then I think probably the third or fourth fret of the string above. They ride the shit out of those riffs too – “Posthumous Rebirth” recycles its version over and over for around a full minute underneath some spacy strumming at 3:00. And that’s if anything one of the lesser sins on offer. In general the problem is that every virtue the album possesses is counterbalanced by a fault elsewhere. For example, the swap in tempo towards the end of “Bloody Redemption” that sees it hunch into this vile midpaced chug is basically neck trauma via state mandate. Legally, it is impermissible not to headbang and failure to do so means that you shall be dragged into an alley somewhere and shot. Yet the other side of the coin is defaced; the song lapses from a promising introduction to an o.k-ish solo and a sluggish riff existing seemingly for no better reason than to bolster a sample of Al Pacino losing his shit in that “The Devil’s Advocate” Movie. Another example? Fine. The songs have solos, which is nice...but then you’ve got the game but perhaps misplaced attempt to stick a bluesy one in “The Witches Laughter”. They’ve had to jam it in quite hard as well because it fits about as well as a hairbrush in a...well. You know. It’s beset by awkward, out of key string bends and the sorts of passable blues noodling that you get when AC/DC cover bands decide to play originals, an it’s completely incongruent in the context of the song. So much of what remains of the album is just sort of there. Not bad, but generic, wrought of phrasing and patterns that you will have heard an abundance of if you’ve spent much time at all with death metal lately.
Maybe such transient maladies wouldn’t matter so much but I’m just not connecting with some of these tracks at all. “The Transcendence of Existence” is unfortunately a woeful way to end the album, slogging past at speeds a beached jellyfish would consider pedestrian alongside a multitude of vocal sins including an out-of-key clean chorus and some antiphrodisiac whispered sections that made my skin crawl clean off my body like a bathrobe made of centipedes. Two instrumental tracks occupy introductory and penultimate places on the album, but at a whisker over a minute each neither adds much of anything worth fighting to retain. Honestly it’s been something of a struggle to find noteworthy positive things to comment on, which is why I’ve wound up padding the review with questionably relevant discursions on anal sex and borscht. Still, sporadic moments of more enthusiastic enjoyment do occur, which is slightly frustrating in that it hints at a more violent, voracious demeanour hidden somewhere within the album that is sadly more content to remain concealed much of the time. “Adepts of Chaos” detonates with a tyrannical landslide of slams and blastbeats to commence hostilities. The ever-hungry revenant of Cannibal Corpse stalks “LCF” and it’s bouncy chromatic grooves. Praise where it’s due also gets lobbed towards the producer’s chair, sat as it is at that marvellous nexus at which clarity and crunch commingle.
In the end, when taken as a whole “Contra Christum” can broadly entertain in a nourishing but unexceptional way, like one of those sandwich/snack/drink meal deals you get from the shop. I’m sure plenty will enjoy this more than I did, but even so I can’t see Sodomic Baptism wrestling anyone else for a top 5 slot in the end of year list. What’s here is largely just passable with a few glaring missteps and a dainty handful of more exultant moments. Is that enough to contend favourably with, say, Death Whore and the adrenalized berserker of an album they dropped this year? I doubt it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a hairbrush to remove.
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