Death chants through vocoder

L'acephale - Heartless and miserable (mp3)
L'acephale on MySpace
L'acephale means "Headless" in french, it was some secret society in 30's, but the band is from USA. If I had to pick a name for their style, it would be Nuclear War Ambient Black Metal. Blackmetal songs here are painfully distorted, fast, aggressive and monotonous. Speedy blastbeating drums are very robotic. Everything is buried in high frequency buzz, sometimes the drums sound as if somebody is numbly hammering the metal plates. It's even more than just mean distortion, it's done with bad production. And it's not that kind of bad that sounds cool, it's just hard to listen. They use probably drum machine. The vocals are also heavily distorted. It's hard to point out the bass because the vocals and guitars are so harsh, but on the low end there's most of the time an one note synthesizer bassline. All together it makes a painful wall of noise, but simple harmonies are still evident somehow. This goes for the BM songs on this album. It's an angry and uncompromising work, but if it would be just that, I would not bother to write about it here. Thankfully things are a bit more varied with L'acephale.
The other half of the material is some kind of darkfolk nuclear war mood music. These endlessly repeating acoustic guitar parts with battlefield noise, distant explosions and operatic female vocal samplings in the background create effectively very hypnotic atmospheres. In one point I totally forgot that there was music playing. I was staring some pointless russian sports channel from TV and I actually realized it several minutes later. Sometimes, after 10 or 15 minutes distorted guitars slowly enter. This connects those slow acoustic and sharp metal parts into one epic story. One of the most interesting tracks on album "Mord und totschlag" is "Heartless and miserable". Acoustic guitar riffs played in slow and monotonous solid rhythm, and a voice of a grim monk filtered through something very close to vocoder! Indeed, nicely surprising idea.
(This picture here isn't L'acephale. I found it from the website of some Hungarian band Öröm. But I thought that this image of death playing Yamaha synthesizer fits perfectly with L'acephale's music).