Diving into Rage Sermon’s work offers all sorts of immediate satisfactions. The first is the artist’s introduction: “If you're looking for love, then you're really at the wrong place. Genre: no fucking idee! closes to Industrial. Honestly, don't give a fuck” Oh, and he’s from Falköping in Sweden, which he describes as a place for rednecks. We don’t actually learn much more, but it’s more than enough and all we need, as it sets the scene perfectly. With UNDERGÅNG, we’re not here to goof off. We’re here to kick arse and get our arses kicked.
For the past ten years or so, Frost_13, the sole member and deranged mind behind Rage Sermon, has been churning out one sonic assault after another, providing the perfect soundtrack for a bloodbath in a cyberpunk universe, without really changing his genre (he doesn't really care, remember): it’s fast-paced, it hits hard, it’s raw and vicious… and that’s just fine! Since his early days, vocals have made an appearance and the guitars have taken on greater prominence… And that’s where the other immediate satisfaction of Rage Sermon comes in: sure, it treats us to a sinister, atmospheric intro, but very quickly UNDERGÅNG transforms intself into a tornado of ultra-violent dark electro/industrial metal, which goes straight to the point – that is, straight for the jugular… The track titles are all written in capital letters because they need to be shouted. The cover art certainly looks like it was done by AI, which is not quite ugly, but given that the rest is great fun and we’ve clearly realised we're not here to quibble and philosophise, we’ll avoid nitpicking at the risk of coming across as snobs (snobbery, in this case, starts the moment you wear trousers and show off by conjugating verbs, when you decide to cram them into your sentences).
FINAL HOUR, AT THE END OF THE WORLD: the opening tracks of the album set the tone straight away. We start with the end of the world, the downfall promised by the title. Everything’s gone to hell, so we might as well smash it all up, and Rage Sermon serves up a massive, furious apocalyptic rave. Frost bellows his slogans with rage (reminiscent of Shaârghot’s roars), whilst heavy, menacing guitars thicken the sound and drive the point home: were you here looking for love? You’ve definitely come to the wrong place.
There’s something deeply satisfying about this succession of wild tracks, this escalation of violence, this thirst for ever more in Rage Sermon. There’s one tell-tale sign: on streaming platforms, from PSYCHOPATH onwards, the little ‘E’ symbol warns us: there’ll be swearing all over the place. YEAH! SWEARING AND YELLING! With its growls from the abyss, PSYCHOPATH is the sort of track that awakens our most primitive instincts – like a cyber-Neanderthal grabbing his club and gas mask and heading off to mosh in the rubble, grunting all the while. Too much? Never! It’s vicious, intense and visceral despite the machines, because you’ve got to admit that the bloke behind it all is going for it and seems to have some serious issues. Rage Sermon invites his mates from Damned to Downfall onto ROTTEN FLESH to grunt about, well, rotten flesh– more impressionist poets who specialise in subtlety with their blend of death metal and industrial – and we get our heads bashed in, a daft, blissful grin on our faces. We drool a bit, but we don’t care.
It has to be said that in a musical landscape where various projects often tend to play up their over-the-top looks to come across as super-menacing, only to ultimately serve up a bland, boring mess, Rage Sermon manages to stand out with a genuine, bratty aggression – a truly playful delight in being nasty. Hear him bellow on END TIME MARCH like the villainous dictator from a B-movie, before hitting us with the basslines of DESTROY – a track that couldn’t have been called anything else – or the cataclysmic grandiloquence of APOCALYPSE MESSIAH. The real masterstroke of this album is that it delivers a continuous adrenaline rush that never runs out – provided you haven’t run a mile within the first few seconds (you snob!).
So when we reach the end, with CELEBRATE THE END, there we are, with filthy hair, bits of skull stuck in our studs, a trickle of drool on our lips and a haggard look on our faces: eh? What? Celebrate the end? But it’s been the end right from the start and we’ve been celebrating it all along! So, to try and unravel the mysteries of Rage Sermon, we put it on again from the start. Seeing as the start was the end, and we’d reached the end, that must mean we have to go back to the start. Hmm. Hmm-hmm. Just to be sure, we turn up the volume. Wow, that was cool!
