1. Geryone’s Throne (27.28)
2. Arrodillate ante la Madera y la piedra (11.36)
3. Oficio de tinieblas (1.26)
4. El lamento del cabrón (16.56)

Beneath the sandstone bedrock & all pervasive bull worship… something stirs

Is March too early to predict Album of the Year just yet? Or is it just fairer to state that GRAN PODER (‘Great Power’) is as overwhelming a debut as any I’ve encountered these past ten years and leave it at that? For this first Orthodox release is a raging and debilitating sonic stag hunt – the beast of any of the doom metal genre I’ve thus far encountered, PLUS its bowel movements emanate from the dry arid regions of Southern Spain, where the Reconquista and the Spanish Inquisition still inform the local popular metal psyche with as strong a grip as the Viking manner in which Thor, Odin, Cromwell, Martin Luther and John Knox still irrigate the anti-monkish/anti-popery of our own northern lands. This Orthodox debut is astonishing – an ever-becoming, ever-outpouring sludge-trudge freerock blitz, cascading cauldrons full of Choukuko no Niwa’s now legendary drum-led epic ‘Fukurou’ over a hugely mannered Sleep-style riffothon, via Sunno)))’s seminal (‘two longhairs in a WWI biplane towing a rainbow’) FLIGHT OF THE BEHEMOTH. It’s as though some Thor-sized Tommy Vance was courting the Goddess Hel herself, making out with a lake of honey mead and a vat of opiated goulash containing four score-and-ten oxen and twenty sheep’s heads. Orthodox is a power trio whose sonic larder is filled to the brim with such cold storage ‘90s basics as The Melvins, Sleep, Trouble, Earth, Sunn0))), Thrones, plus they’ve added to the mix an inevitable ur-trudge of early Sabbath, DANCE OF THE LEMMINGS-period Amon Duul 2 and Yankee Sabbalike’s Bang (‘Future Shock’), with unconscious nods to early Japrock deadbeats Speed Glue & Shinki (‘Red Doll’), Joey Smith’s Philipino walking dead Juan De La Cruz (‘Wanna Take You Home’) and Flower Travellin’ Band’s evenmorestrungoutthantheoriginal versh of ‘Black Sabbath’ or (again) Flower’s own ‘Hiroshima’. Then, Orthodox have taken Neil Young’s RAGGED GLORY feedback endings and welded them in parallel to create Queen Elizabeth/Slomo-sized flame-outs and lashed them to the end of each track. Yup, Orthodox has copped their metaphor and nailed the coffin lid shut on that sucker in one single CD release. Moreover, on top of these staples sprinkled like a frosted winter icing come the exotic ingredients from outerstate – let’s try the Boredoms’ digital FAUST TAPES sleight-of-hand located on VISION CREATION NEW SUN, let’s avoid yer typical Cookie Monster doom vocals and substitute a ghostly and more stellar vaporous heat haze vocal, more so even than Joe’s post-Plant screech on Flower Travellin’ Band’s SATORI; yup, a Catholic vocal more redolent of Demis Roussos’ eerie desert citadel yodel on Aphrodite’s Child’s massive 1972 double-LP 666. Bassist/singer Marco claims to have been best inspired by Lemmy and Venom’s Cronos, but his own achievements on this record are several octaves higher and more mysterious than either

However the band reached this barbarian classic, Orthodox obviously worked hard to nail their own ultra-specific metaphor good and proper right from the off. Unsurprisingly, their own press release reveals a group of fundamentalist musicians whose ur-riff was deeply hewn and strait-jacketed with limitations from the off; and it’s a concept which they have achieved, and in spades, claiming to provide ‘a liturgic music with obsessive repetitions, minimalism, feedback, distortion and endless drones creating a primitive feeling that leads to trance and remains as a perfect soundtrack for every dark point of Christianism: oppression, sin, suffering, guilt and pain.” Well, gentlemen, you just about done the whole fucking deal on this record. But Christian this disc truly ain’t – this shit is more of the half-light Christianity you find in the Iberian outer-reaches, the kind where the local priest leads the local virgins to a great stone with a pathetic crucifix shrivelling in the noonday sun upon its summit, the kind of Christianity in which a statue of the local saint is curtly transported on a pony and trap to the nearest holy well, and let down on a rope and told to make the rain… or else! The Mediterranean regions are full of this kind of errant so-called Christianity, and Orthodox done captured the whole trip hook, line and sinker.

Inspired by one of those Black Rune stories you get on the net featuring characters with names such as Bryton and Merlin, ‘Geryone’s Throne’ is the killer opener that woulda sent Orthodox straight to the top of the class were it the only song they ever offered up to us. It contains all of the aforementioned in-breedients in a single 27-minute endurance test that first psychedelicizes then refashions the listener’s brain using any electric means possible, nay, even at times reducing itself to no more than thunderous cymbal crashes. The mighty techtonic upheavals of Khanate are here replaced – especially on track two (‘Arrodillate ante la Madera y la piedra’) by a kind of Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine splatter-chatter of a-rhythmical drumming that so engulfs the track that only brutally simple riffage can haul both listener AND musicians out of the quagmire. Orthodox are even confident enough to offer us a third track under two minutes in length (‘Oficio de tinieblas’) comprising just stentorian snare drums and simplistic drone piano. But best of all is the humour of the 16-minute closer ‘El Lamento del Cabrón’ which – by employing the same geek’s bright spirit as Dylan Carlson snagged by slowing down Skynyrd’s ‘Freebird’ for Earth’s 1995 classic ‘Ripped on Fascist Ideas’ – here allows this Spanish doom trio to cop Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’ and drive it at the same speed as a low-geared street cleaning wagon. Elements of Stephen O’Malley’s e-bow fixation and even moments from his FUNGAL HEX Prague installation surface from time to time below the shattering husks of drum/guitar assault, as Orthodox temporarily tames the sonic horned one under a fusillade of San Miguel bottles and holy water. It’s one Hel of a record, m’dears. And one that sets its stall out for others to come and try to better. Hey, the evidence is clear, ladies and gentlemen. Rock’n’roll will never die and Heavy Metal has barely started. All we need now is to slay the Religious Beast once and for all and the rest, as they say, is a breeze. Sideways, Motherfuckers, and don’t spare the Born Again Cretins!