Lebanon-sired black/death renegades hone their blistering craft
IT’S A MIRACLE that Kaoteon exist. The Lebanese black /death metal project’s leader, Anthony Kaoteon, was born in 1983 in Beirut, and spent every other day of his childhood in a bomb shelter during a 15-year-long civil war. He started his band in his mid-teens, then endured ungrounded arrests and the inability to tour internationally for more than a decade, before relocating to the Netherlands in 2012.
Neither God Nor Master is the third album since Kaoteon emigrated halfway around the world. The stars that leant the band’s last, self-titled full-length its pedigree – namely, ex-Obscura bassist Linus Klausenitzer and At The Gates sticksman Adrian Erlandsson – return. However, co-founding singer Walid Wolflust has vanished, replaced by Dutch unknown Terry Stocker.
Initially, it’s the singer who widens thehe seethes and sobs over ominous arpeggios, his howl of heralding the album’s first distorted guitar lick. It’s an apt start for 10 songs laden with high-pitched hisses, each one so packed with anguish it paints the picture of a man not sustainably growling into a microphone, but uncontrollably wailing over the whole world’s suffering.
