REVIEW: Fister & CHRCH - Fister/CHRCH (Split LP)

By: Mark Ambrose

Album Type: Split

Date Released: 17/11/2017

Label: Battleground Records |

Crown & Throne Ltd

Over the course of nearly forty minutes, CHRCH and Fister, employing different sonic palettes and lineups, craft a perfect split for the moment: unholy, polluted, funereal and dismal – a requiem for humanity’s end times that is as beautiful as it is ugly.

“Fister/CHRCH” DD//LP track listing

1. CHRCH – “Temples”

2. Fister – “The Ditch”

The Review

Let’s talk metal review terminology.  Like so many fellow travelers in the trenches of modern heavy music, I find myself having to crack open a thesaurus to praise a new release and not fall upon my tried and true descriptors: punishing, brutal, transcendent, dissonant, complex, or simply “heavy as fuck”.  It’s a problem as old as criticism itself, intensified in a modern context because the aporia between “not listened” and “listened” is practically non-existent; if you have a few minutes and a smart phone you can listen to practically any piece of music ever created.  The role of the blogger or critic or (cringe) “rock journalist”, then is perhaps to magnify the relevant, the underrepresented, or the overlooked – maybe to shout down the pretenders and opportunists – and to still offer some enthusiastic “fuck yeahs” when nothing else will suffice.

So is the latest split from CHRCH and Fister a brutal, transcendent, dissonant, punishing slab of metal?  Fuck yeah it is.  Perhaps more exceptionally, it exemplifies the core sublime element of metal: sustained tension.  Over the course of nearly forty minutes, CHRCH and Fister, employing different sonic palettes and lineups, craft a perfect split for the moment: unholy, polluted, funereal and dismal – a requiem for humanity’s end times that is as beautiful as it is ugly.

Sacramento’s CHRCH are akin to a dual guitar wielding cousin to Bell Witch, painting in the same inverted sacral tones as the rightfully lauded duo.  The reverb heavy guitar and bass intro of their track, “Temples” has similar sonic qualities as the ‘Witch, but when the drums, vocals, and distortion kick in, CHRCH establishes itself as a five-headed beast.  For all the layers of dissonance seething under the surface of “Temples”, there is remarkable harmony between the dual guitars of Chris and Karl, buoyed by the rhythmic interplay of Ben and Adam.  If there was any hope or positivity in the harmonies at work in “Temples”, lead vocalist Eva lays waste with every rasped line and tortured shriek.  A haunting spoken word middle cemented the image of an unholy evangelist in my head, spewing atrocities before sliding into more subdued, but perhaps even more sinister homilies.  The nasty, sludgy closing section amps up the tension – mutating and evolving before collapsing into the same ethereal opening riff.  This return to origins creates a kind of time dilation effect, where 17 minutes seems to have passed in the blink of an eye.  It makes it that much easier to revisit “Temples” and discover new dark alcoves within.

With “The Ditch” Fister offers a mirror image to CHRCH’s harmonies and emotive reverb, screeching into life like a genetic hybrid birthed into a gutter.  Bassist Snarzyk’s vocals are fascinating in the same way watching a hook suspension performance is fascinating: it’s an uncanny glimpse at the human instrument’s capacity for punishment.  Snarzyk traverses every register, from low end growl to high end shriek, absolutely shredding his throat and the listeners’ ears with ever syllable.  The relentless six-minute assault of static and feedback makes Newstead’s tremolo guitar solo a nearly welcome respite, until he too pulls the rug out and pushes the sound back into harsh dissonance.  A long, nearly ambient bridge is a mercy, and amplifies the already unbearable tension.  When Fister launches back in, with Kirk Gatterer’s leviathan drum bashing and the screamed vocals now layered in a demonic choir of anguish, the feeling is nearly existential: there is no escape from the imminent rupture ahead.

Once again, it’s nearly impossible to praise these aural monuments to entropy without offering the same descriptors I give a lot of my favorite listens.  But perhaps it’s because these exceptional groups are pulling out the core anxieties of our present.  From spiritual collapse to relentless violence, CHRCH and Fister are excavating the temples and ditches of the metal underground.  Experienced together, they serve as a perfect soundtrack to our culture of perpetual apocalypse.

“Fister/CHRCH” split 12" is available here & here soon

Band info: Fister || Chrch