Stillbirth in the Temple of Venus - Arizmenda, 2014

I haven’t listened to anything from The Black Twilight Circle before. I saw that Arizmenda was on the lineup for Maryland Deathfest XX, which I am attending, so I decided to give this project a listen. The production is incredibly raw and lo-fi. I can barely even make out this guys vocals in the mix. I can only hear the occasional long winded shriek. Looking at the titles, I already knew the lyrics would be somewhat sexual. Correct I was. Honestly, I am a big fan of sexually depraved lyrics, I am into that shit myself. But hearing all this submissive stuff coming from a man is just comical. The lyrics on the first track "Scabbed Knees, Rope and Vaseline" sound like they could’ve come from some gay scene kids electronicore project back in 2009 about wanting to be dominated by his goth dommy mommy fantasy. And that’s what this whole albums energy kind of goes towards. I mean, what did I expect from a black metal project coming from Los Angeles? But the actual sound itself of this album is actually really dark. I love the sound and the atmosphere; I just feel as though some tracks such as the first one are incredibly repetitive. Just when I thought the first track was cringe, we have track number two, "Cum in Your Wound" which is even worse. Gosh I haven’t read lyrics as gay as this in a long time: "Make me a servant Faithful Faithul boy Put me in my cage." And this track sounds exactly like the first one. Then we have the third track "Rotted Seed...Poisoned Egg" which has lyrics like "Bruise me and bite me." I didn’t get the memo that we were making emo edgelords MySpace statuses into lyrics now haha. Its like this for the rest of the album. This guy is just living his twinky submissive kinks through the lyrics here and everything is very repetitive. Seeing the hype around this album and the raving reviews, I was really excited to listen to this. I was disappointed. Seeing how people say this is the "best" Arizmenda album, its gonna take a lot of convincing for me to listen to another one. All I got from this was "kinda gay...meh!" I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I use this blog to be honest, not agreeable.