Today’s upload, the second album by Caged Bastard, is a treat for us in more ways than one – and it’s an impressively difficult work to describe, so we’ll make an effort to be straightforward in this review.

First, we love it because it’s musically a smorgasbord (or whatever the fuck you write that) of elements and genres of everything between ambient, black metal, sludge, noise, some folk and drone, progressive stuff, all put together in a blender and mixed into a cohesive soup – then garnished with a buttload of psychedelia for measure, making “avant-garde psychedelic black metal” the shortest, and very insufficient, way to label it. Think Oranssi Pazuzu talking to Muslimgauze and… dunno, maybe some late Rotting Christ and Ulver and Myrath and a lot more stuff.

And we don’t mention Myrath by accident: Caged Bastard is the work of also Tunisian artist Muhammad Oun with some guests for vocals, lyrics and artwork, which makes this effort even more beloved to us since it’s only the second time we have featured artists from the African continent – and it’s also one of the very few times we have had music from Muslim-majority countries. This influences the music quite a bit (check track 6, “Into Debris“, for a clear example), and helps in the struggle against the racist, Eurocentric and Islamophobic stereotypes that permeate much of the metal underground, even seeping into the leftist parts of it.

Third, this album was recorded during the COVID lockdown, and the sheer desperation is rather present in the awesome lyrics, which tell a story that also has to be shortened – in the author’s own words, “We try to dispose of negativity to raise potential, but chaos is order still undeciphered. We scoured the horizons, we strived for the ultimate price… Did we find Solace?” Our own answer is: that there’s no solace under capitalism for longer than very short timespans, but Solace in Virtue’s Absence definitely helps establish one of them.

⚔️ CAGED BASTARD ⚔️

BC: https://cagedbastard.bandcamp.com/

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