Few love loathing as much as Wrath, the evil mastermind behind Greece’s Dodsferd; in fact, it’s all but certain that he actively hates you and me this very second. Asked by one interviewer what motivates him to keep pushing his devilish, crusty strain of black metal, Wrath offered a matter-of-fact reply: “My everlasting hate towards every living being!” And look how far that hate has taken him: what was once a one-man project has blossomed into a full quartet and spawned an impressive discography, including eight full-length LPs (most notably, 2007’s twin terrors, Fucking Your Creation and Cursing Your Will to Live) and splits with Happy Days, Necronoclast, and others.
Now we have The Parasitic Survival of the Human Race, a blistering suite with a relentless hardcore heartbeat, and a work surrounded on all sides by the sounds of humanity at its most delirious—specifically, the screams and sirens that flooded the streets of Athens during the 2012 riots. A muffled gunshot, the blood-curdling curses of protesters, seas of white noise: chaos seeps into every square inch of interstitial tissue separating the album’s five tracks, sustaining a mob scene for the album’s duration. The motif gets a bit tiresome by record's end, but at least initially, the confusion inherent in this aural overload lends itself well to gut-wrenching surprises like the jagged riff that crashes down a minute into the “Stupid Worthless Sheep”. Aside from providing plenty of thrills, the The Parasitic Survival of the Human Race also boasts the clearest, tightest production on a Dodsferd album to date, continuing the sonic clean-up that began on 2008’s Death Set the Beginning of My Journey. Wrath’s once-garbled screams cut into the din a bit more now, shaking with the organic intensity of a Jacob Bannon or Erlend Hjelvik.
Those extra dashes of punk in the mix lend the album some welcome immediacy, but neither the airtight mixing nor the catchy riffs can mitigate redundancy altogether. On opener “Breeding Chaos”, Nadir seems content to carry meat-and-potatoes hardcore riffs past the point of disinterest, dulling their sawtoothed impact; “Doubting Your Worth” suffers from the same water-treading, spared at the last minute by a teeth-gnashing coda. At a lean, mean three minutes, you'd think the cover of the Misfits’ “We Are 138” that closes the record would be the perfect way to shake off the doldrums of the mammoth tracks that precede it and provide a satisfying, succinct conclusion to the party. It’s a shame that the tribute morphs into a strange game of vocal showboating by the third verse, only to disappear into the apocalyptic Athens soundscapes for good. It’s almost as though Wrath got bored.
And there's the rub: The Parasitic Survival of the Human Race is the leanest Dodsferd LP to date, packing all that misery into five tracks in thirty minutes, but it still can’t shake off its bloat. Die-hard misanthropists will most likely be able to overlook the tedium and bask in the glory of the gospel of Wrath, but for the rest of us, the album feels uninspired.
