Review Summary: Gloomy, decadent and addicting, this record will lure you into its downward spiral and kiss your anus.
There are some things in life that you just can’t get used to, like serendipity. Serendipity is trying to build a sand castle by the river, and accidentally finding a gold flake in the water. Serendipity is being forced to go to the disco and unexpectedly meeting the love of your life. Serendipity is googling “kiss the anus of a black cat” to satiate your fetish for young girls kissing animal buttocks and ending up finding your new favorite neo-folk band instead.
Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat is a Belgian band led by a man who goes by the aptly chosen name of Stef Irritant. The introduction of this album is an acoustic piece played with a drop D tuning, which already hints at the overall vibe of the record: since most of the album is played in D minor, the lower D string is used as a drone to mimic medieval Celtic music and the baroque technique of basso continuo. The verse of the first proper song, ‘The Firesky’, is a prime example of this, but if you’re looking for light-hearted upbeat European folk music, look elsewhere. True to his made-up family name, Stef Irritant sings with an apocalyptic and harrowing voice, constantly out of tune but in a very measured and well-planned manner. The refrain completes the stylistic framework of the band by offering a desperate choir that sounds like it comes from either middle age England or central Yharnam, slightly held back by a suboptimal thin mixing that cut too many low-mids here and there. The band loves dynamics, the songs range from delicate acoustic tunes to majestic distorted outbursts. To show off how they honed the art of creating walls of sound, they included a cover of ‘Beyond the Tanarian Hills’ by the British anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, obviously in D minor (them Belgian bois really love the D). Needless to say, it sounds nothing like the original, if you didn’t know it was a cover it would be hard to distinguish it from the rest of the record. Among all the instruments that make up the wall of sound, a bagpipe is distinctively playing a Dorian scale, a mode whose major sixth degree is usually associated with the song ‘Greensleeves’ by the average western man. It might not sound like a big deal, but this small deviation from a normal minor scale brings the band’s music closer to the whole medieval aesthetic that they want to achieve. It’s details like this that make this album so good.
Don’t be fooled by the band’s name either. The name apparently comes from an ancient ritual performed to identify witches (if any of you know exactly how the ritual is carried out, please let me know), and this interest in shamanism and folk beliefs is reflected in the lyrics. It sounds like Stef is a self-proclaimed messiah of a new religion and is preaching stuff about morality and the end of the world. Most of the time the meaning of the lyrics is very obscure and unclear, just like any respectable religious text… Is he talking about respecting God? Or perhaps about how our lack of decency is setting the sky on fire? Or maybe he genuinely enjoys kissing ani of black cats? There are occasional grammar errors in the lyrics, and the wobbly sentence structure of this review is a tribute to them.
The album is not free from defects though. Apart from the aforementioned imperfect mixing (although the album is still an enjoyable listen production-wise), the last five minutes of ‘Beyond the Tanarian Hills’ could have been avoided, and generally speaking the songs drag it out more than once. Considering the overall quality of the music though, this is hardly a deal-breaker, but a bit more focus could have made this record a masterpiece. To some people, the long instrumental sections might even be a highlight, as they have the potential to drag the listener into a state of hypnotic trance, but the biggest strengths of the album lie in its medieval decadent charm. The closing track, a final testament of the band’s ability to create an eerie atmosphere, is a tranquil acoustic song that anticipates the band’s intentions on ‘Hewers of Wood, Drawers of Water’, a quieter and more introspective album less focused on ferocity and desperation, and probably their most successful one.
If you’re new to the genre and you don’t know if such an album deserves your time, try listening to ‘The Firesky’ and ‘The Cranes Are Scared of Sunwords’. The rest of the songs isn’t quite as immediate, so if you don’t like those two, chances are this album is not for you, but if you’re not feeling intimidated by the thin mixing and the long instrumental interludes composed by a single chord, go for it. Give this album some time, let the music absorb you in its gloomy pagan charm, and you’ll be part of our cult in no time. Soon enough we will be kissing feline ani together, and trust me, you won’t regret it.
4.1/5.0
