Sometimes I'm not sure if I listen to black metal more for the music or the folklore attached to it. Thankfully, with the Black Funeral's Scourge of Lamashtu it's not a contest. The music is as weird and twisted as the demons evoked by the album and song titles. This should be expected from old masters of the insidious arts like Black Funeral. As one of the US's longest-running raw black metal bands, they've had a few moons to whet their trades and collect enough ingredients for a baneful repast, at which they offer us a seat about every two to four years.
Scourge of Lamashtu follows the Black Funeral's Ankou and the Death Fire, an album that introduced a more distressed melodic quality to the group's increasingly atmospheric compositions. Scourge of Lamashtu continues in the same discordant stride as its predecessor, a direction that I think works for the band, even as it tests the boundaries of their sound in ways that demonstrate its limited carrying capacity.
The album does an admirable job of staying on brand, imparting upon the listener the details of Lamashtu's infanticidal transgressions. The demon is unique in Mesopotamian folklore as not only being a god in her own right, but self-directed in her actions. Unlike other malevolent forces who were active in Mesopotamian society, Lamashtu is depicted as acting outside the decrees of the Anu, the sky god. She chooses to steal infants from their cribs to dine on their blood and to maim nursing mothers as an autonomous and willful actor. The reasons for her vengeful zeal against children and their mothers are as multitudinous as the stars. So numerous in fact, as to feel almost arbitrary in the aggregate. Although, her association with the Hebrew demon Lilith may give some clue as to the root causes of her scorn. How ever you frame her hostility in terms of motivation, it's incredibly compelling to hear her retribution put to song.
Most of the tracks on Scourge of Lamashtu begin with a mood-setting inauguration passage. Usually a combination of drum machines, low-register frequencies, and incantations- spoken in hushed, tortured tones. Opener "Kassaptu Lemuttu (Incantations of Zaqiqu-Demons of the Underworld)" is no different, beginning deep in the pits of forbidden mythic noise before landing on your back from an unseen perch and subduing you with a submission grip made of cold, barbed grooves. "The Vampyric Rabisu at the Threshold" sucks you through the threshold of a zoological crypt into the icy hail of a Emperor-esque, primitive orchestral squawl. "Nergal, Lord Who Prowls by Night" embraces an almost tribal beat along with a claustrophobic affray of jutting guitar lashes and antithetical synth snarls. "Seven Udug-hul" has a breath-robbing, cyclical guitar-line that is merciless paired with an ore-beating rhythm, a conflagration that parts as if at the mouth of the strait into a bay of clear, black, reflective sound. "Scourge of Lamashtu (She Who Strangles the Lamb)" appropriately feels like the combination of its antecedents and features some of the most genuinely lugubrious guitar work on the entire album. From there, the album reaches a climax with the liminal, melodic grandeur of "Gidim-hul, Blood Thirst of the Dead," and finally concluds with the chaos winds of "Pazuzu, King of the Lilu-Demons," which calls upon the protective spirit to perform his ascribed role in shielding the mothers and their fledglings from the scourge of Lamashtu's appetite.
I have no idea if Scourge of Lamashtu is the best raw black metal about a plague god to drop in the year of an actual plague, but for what it's worth, I enjoyed it and it gave me an excuse to do a fair amount of myth spelunking. And that's worth an awful lot in my book, if I'm being honest with you (which I usually am).
