Lustmord – The Monstrous Soul

Looking back on this album is something of an interesting exercise. It was the album released after Lustmord's breakthrough "Heresy" and before his arguably most famous work, "The Place Where the Black Stars Hang." You don't hear too much about this album as a result.

On discogs I gave it a 5/5. On the 1-100 scale I favor though, I'd give this an 86, however. It's very hit and miss for me. The first track is not one of my favorites from Lustmord - it's a quote repeated too often. The second track is good but again frustrating - it has some poorly utilized/repeated vocal samples and two parts that don't make a cohesive whole. The third track is surprisingly effective - this track would really impress me but again, hackneyed vocal samples. "Aaaaaah!" Otherwise it's a great example of the haunting power of minimalism trumping the more obviously "frightening" roar heard in the first part of track 3.

Track 4 - "The Daathian Doorway" - you can hear the type of haunting dark space drone that will grace dark ambient for decades still to come presumably, and towards the end the track fades out into quiet yet menacing dissonace. Very nice. Any bad vocal samples? No. Nice.

Track 5 - "The Fourth and Final Key." Minimal. Minimal. Kinda creepy. Pretty neat. Still minimal. Well, there's like these giant footsteps. Deep bass sounds. Then the evil droning chant comes in, and all of a sudden this track is a whole new ballgame. The rest of the track is structured around this and towards the end it gets slightly more chaotic, but really - give a long, hard listen as to how this track is structured and what Lustmord had going on back in 1992. Track 3 is more than double than the length of this one, but I count track 4 and particularly track 5 as the pieces of history to take away from this.

This album is interesting for another reason. Every track is better than the previous one. You don't think that's likely after "The Daathian Doorway" but after listening to "The Fourth and Final Key" I think to myself, if I had to make a double disc compilation to try and grab new fans to Lustmord, a retrospective of the more commercially accessible sort, I'd put this one on here.

So it's kind of weird to slap this with a 5/5 since the first couple of tracks are not the strongest with those annoying vocal samples but this is still a really good album.