Scheich In China Arschgesichter Des Todes

One of two hellish new Scheich in China albums, the malefic form of ‘Arschgesichter des Todes’
looms like a soundtrack to petrifying night terrors with a devil-baiting parade of ungodly
pleasures. The harder hearing among you may be familiar with Philipp Meiers and Alsen Rau’s
work in this guise from a number of LPs issued on local Hamburg labels since 2014, and should also
recognise this one as closest to source, mostly ditching the drone and technoid elements in favour
of pure death metal throttle and blizzard dynamics.
Riddled with dread and venom, the album shells a cavalcade of enslaved drum machine and wiry
guitars (ir)resplendent in typically lo-fi recording virtues and hungry to gnaw the nerves of any
poor soul in earshot. Of course it’s an outright buzz if you like this stuff, shy of the sort of vocal
theatrics that can put some heads off, but with steely, uncompromising focus on the textures,
energy and an end-of-earth primordial thrust that makes Death Metal, proper, such a uniquely
extreme proposition.
At its longest, ’Nosebleeding Diarrhea Pus Mucus’ sums up the sound literally and viscerally, while
the rest of it tends to more succinct assaults on the senses, spanning the heck-raising charge of
‘The Virgin Witch’ thru the inferno-in-the-next-room of ‘Deine Gebeine’, tape sodden squall of
‘Satan Needs no Forks’ and martial mini-epic ‘Postatomicwat Hookers’, with their sick sense of
humour epitomised in the title and grindcore flay of ‘The eBook of Dead’.