CoT is a fem fronted 5 piece blackened crust band from El Paso Texas. There isn’t much punk at all with this outfit, apart from the red / anarchist message. ISKRA call themselves anarchist metal, and this outfit isn’t far from that description. The demo package for this CD is awesome and totally DIY. Even the CD itself has the album cover printed onto the top with a glossy finish. To Serve Man is 7 tracks (two of which open and close the album with no lyrics) played out in a little bit more than 30 minutes. Recorded and released in 2012, by Culture War Distro. The lyrics, just like the art, are anti – Christian in general, and talk about body politics and street riots in particular. Two of the songs are entirely sung in Spanish, true to nature as some of the members are of Hispanic origin. Their latest effort is a split release with a power violence band from Phoenix called Biocidio.
The opening track, Twilight of Capitalism 2, is a 3 minute instrumental prelude of the anarchist crust to come. The guitar plays a repetitive minor key riff amidst sounds of urban unrest and general chaos, most likely caused by civil warfare. Lots of sound samples keep it interesting for the 3:20, and ends with a crowd chanting for either peace or freedom.
Bottomless Execration comes next and instantly brings the black metal inspired crust that will play out through the rest of this album. Minor key riffage on dual guitars, truly off the wall drumming that fully drowns itself in the art of blst beats, and reverb on the screeched out vocals. COMMUNION OF THIEVES truly is a force to be reckoned with. Beauty Beyond An Image slows the pace a bit, but just to make it more clearly emotional and melodic without losing the aggression. Innocencia Interrumptida quickly returns to blast beat black metal form. The acoustic intro for Black Earth is great, and the basic guitar pattern is used a lot through the rest of the song, albeit faster and distorted. Pasos Libres is definitely one of the best musical compositions, there’s a lot of rage seething to escape, and after it is released, it gets washed into the drainage ditch with a thunderstorm, which ends up cleansing the listener in a rain storm with acoustic guitars before this beast is put to rest.
This demo is amazing and has top – notch production but retains a dusty feeling from the desert. Although I thought this album would be very difficult to improve upon, you should really check out the new material on their bandcamp page, since they were able to do just that.
COMMUNION OF THIEVES facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Communion-of-Thieves/150111081711829
COMMUNION OF THIEVES bandcamp: http://communionofthieves.bandcamp.com/
