Feb 052025
 

(On January 31st Iron Bonehead Productions ushered in the return, after 30 years, of the German band Naked Whipper, and now we’re providing Zoltar‘s review of their new album.)

I know better. Fuck, I was there. So don’t believe those claiming they were right from the get-go into Blasphemy and their likes back in the mid-’90s because they weren’t. Truth be told, back then what was to be called ‘war metal’ and their likes had very few disciples. Even if death metal was on its way out, I guess most of them hadn’t come to terms with the new definition of what extreme metal stood for and what the heck this both annoying and fascinating corpsepainted kid known as black metal had to do with it.

What I do know though is that when Naked Whipper‘s first full-length Paintreaks unexpectedly dropped in 1995, most of us dismissed it, including me. Their only claim to fame was that their bass player and vocalist was briefly Blood‘s frontman for their cult Christbait album released three years later but that was about it. As a matter of fact, the result sounded to my ears like a more satanic-flavored and primitive version of Blood, and thus was immediately suspected of jumping on the left hand path band-wagon, especially since it was being put out by MMI Records off Germany (Morbid Records‘ little brother if you catch the reference), then first and foremost renowned for putting out ugly death metal and grindcore, such as Avulsed, Dead or Deranged.

Fast forward three decades: we’re all old a tad older (I am at least) and ‘war metal’ has now become a genre on its own, with a small but extremely dedicated fanbase. After what we call in this business ‘doing a Varg’ (that is, serving time in prison for manslaughter), Naked Whipper mainman Dominus A. S. (or Alex Schultz to his mom) is at it again, picking up things exactly where he left them off.

With their back catalogue reissued already on Iron Bonehead, you can actually do the math yourself: the Chris Moyen Baphomet-sponsored black and white cover; the monolithic grinding rhythmic approach; the sleazy lyrics; Dominus’ half-grunted, half-screaming vocal performance; the depraved vibe… Apart from some of the songs now exceeding the three-minute mark (I know, big deal right?), Chapel Defilement feels like Painstreakspart 2 and it’s both its biggest achievement and potential downfall.

On one side, one could applaud Herr Dominus for taking us with him on his time traveling machine back to 1995, with a slightly revamped production to boot. But on the other, do we really need to re-do this? Especially since while he was gone, his fellow countrymen Goatblood did even better than keeping his seat warm with a string of more sinister if as grinding albums?

Your call, although one can’t deny its intensity nor the fact that this typically German way (i.e., not as chaotic as it may sound at first) at giving a very grinding edge to the otherwise quite black-laden war metal style, dubbed as ‘blackgrind’ by our own Islander, deserves to be heard at least once…

https://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com/album/naked-whipper-chapel-defilement
https://ironbonehead.de/
https://www.instagram.com/naked_whipper_

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