Like most people who claim the ignoble mantle and nerd de plume of audiophile, I'm still catching up on releases from 2025 (formerly the dumbest year on record, a record that was subsequently surpassed by the first week of 2026). Of the things that I'm glad that I've scooped out of the eye of the abyss is 1349's live record
Winter Mass. Recorded around the time that the lockdowns were lifted in (presumably) Oslo (or some other godless, frigid plateau), this live record is a raw but vital procession of ugly and void-gouging sound that demonstrates pertinently just why the band has been able to maintain an audience for close to three decades on this cursed ball of dirt we call a planet. Unavoidably (at least for me), hearing
Winter Mass has made me nostalgic for the album that introduced me to the band in the first place, 2014's
Massive Cauldron of Chaos. It's not, as far as I know, considered one of their better albums, but it's also not one of their worst- it just tends to be the one that I think about most whenever I'm reminded of 1349... which is any time the subject of medieval diseases comes up (which in my life is more than you'd think for someone who is neither a physician nor a historian, but who does watch an awful lot of
Apothecary Diaries). Named for the year that the black plague finally overtook Norway, 1349's most obvious references stylewise are groups like Mayhem and early Satyricon, although there are instances of Kreator-esque thrash riffage, most notable on the clamoring gnaw of gothic angst “Slaves,” the second song off the album I'm presently examining. In general,
MCoC is a return to the band’s coldly masterful, blood-nourished roots. The previous decade was one of experimentation for the group, releasing boundary-pushing albums
Revelations of the Black Flame in 2009 and
Demonoir in 2010, both of which were received with hyperbolic consternation by corpse-painters who prefer to keep things fast and nasty. This superfluous ire was mostly quelled by
MCoC’s return to form though, with Ravn’s raspy forked-tongue vocals, Archaon’s peeling shred torrents, and the super-human speed of drummer Frost’s legendary percussion laying waste to the expectations of their audience, and further treating them to a dip in a bubbling lake of acid swirling with a crimson foam of vicera-churned froth on “Cauldron,” rending them like a rag doll in a tug of war between two competing zombified pit bulls on “Exorcism,” disfiguring them beyond recognition on the bruisingly unshackled melee of “Chained,” and then mercilessly desecrating their remains on the groovy gang press of “Postmortem.” 1349 would indulge in more abstract forms of expression on subsequent releases, 2019's
The Infernal Pathway and 2024's
The Wolf & the King, but the stewing malignance of
MCoC was undoubtedly the odious succor needed to breathe fresh hellfire into the group, rallying them to carry their campaign of darkness into the 21st Century.
Bringer of a long dusk of discord (Season of Mist).
