If you like your black metal with a little bit of swag- a dapper dive into the more fashionable side of death, mayhem and murder, then the Catalan maniacs BARBARIAN SWORDS from Barcelona might scratch that itch until it’s an open, festering wound. This prolific Spanish band has been around for more than a decade, and “Anti-Dogma Megaforce” is their fifth full-length release and the first since 2019’s gloriously entitled “Totemic Anal Turbofucker”. Punctuated by Von Päx’s high-pitched blackened shrieks, the band engages in a total flurry of blackened metal whose guitars are big, thick and sluggish, with the low tones of Panzer’s bass and Uretra’s simple, powerful drumming laying a foundation for true destruction. There’s a punk rock spirit to the music BARBARIAN SWORDS puts out.  That’s not to take away from the sheer ugliness that drenches the thirty minutes of sonic mania, but songs like “Nuke Barcelona” are less than two-minute barrages of sound. None of the songs are technically complicated, but that only adds to the intensity.  In the aforementioned song, Von Päx growls “NUKE BARCELONA” over furious blast beats and tremolo-picked guitars before the song falls into an uptempo rock and roll beat (albeit one covered in phlegm, plasma and blood-particles). It’s a riff-heavy album, typically shifting back and forth from one to another over a couple of minutes.  “A Mountain of Corpses” shifts back and forth before equally dissonant melodies, the vocals drenched in affects, Steamroller’s guitars squealing in some sort of Frankenstein-like attempt at blackened leads. All the songs seem to have keyboards buried in the background, like the fluid on the lungs of a heart attack victim.  They aren’t too invasive, however, and do a good job of elevating the songs sonically.  

 “Glorious Deicide” is a majestic, funeral-like spastic dirge of lament. The guitars, keys and Von Päx’s vocals ride up front and Uretra’s drums are DARKTHORNE-like rock and roll dipped in the corpse paint.  The band closes the album with the epic “A Thousand Impaled Heads,” at almost eight minutes the longest song on the album.  Starting with a keyboard swell, the band collapses into a windstorm of blackened guitars and a plaintive scream. The drums stutter and stop, roll and careen off the sonic walls put up by the band.  Vocally, Von Päx sounds as disturbed and pained as he has on any of the previous songs. Good black metal songs have the ability to evoke the pain of grief and the hopelessness of loss, and “A Thousand Impaled Heads” does just that. There’s no real narrative on Von Päx’s part, but it’s the music that carries the weight of the tale in this case. At four minutes, the band slows things down to a doomish pace, big chords ringing out into the night sky, and we start to realize that if Colonel Walter Kurtz from Apocalypse Now had a theme song, this one just might be it.

 “Anti-Dogma Megaforce” is a strong release from these Spanish rockers- a short, concise slab of blackened metal.  While the songs tend to bleed into one another, upon careful inspection each one has its own nuanced way of communicating the horrors of existence. Following on the footsteps of an album named after a totemic anal turbofucker can’t be easy, but who would expect less from a band of ne’er-do-wells from the Iberian peninsula.