Reviving its snarling head from its original pressing in 2009 comes Shadow of the Torturer’s Marching Into Chaos in full re-recorded splendor. For those of you keeping track, the band’s third revision of the album has recently surfaced and features mild deviations from its original content. The title track has been completely omitted this time around, as well as “The Walk” and “Alone At Night” being formed into a single track instead of the separate entities they had been prior to this release. Something for everyone definitely rings brilliantly true here – an LP, CD and digital version of the same album all different in some fashion or form. Regardless of its current facet, Marching Into Chaos stamped SOTT’s scathing vision of creating some of the most haunting and sensory-obliterating doom known to humankind.
Introspective, without deviation or remorse, Marching Into Chaos lapses amongst foreboding spoken prose and crawling menace that carries throughout and builds towards a viscerally inexplicable tension. This feeling allows for an intense depth of languished despair to flood within every drawn verse, crashing cataclysmically in beautifully portrayed disharmony. Opening to a string of reverberated feedback and agonized vocals, Shadow of the Torturer establish their dominance early on with a powerful intro that sets the unnerving tempo of the album. Building onward to the triumphant display that is “The Walk / Alone At Night,” which, through incidentally combining these two tracks, creates the embodiment of the sheer sonic force that SOTT bend to their maniacal will. Not to be outdone, the band mixes in a mesmerizing cover of Black Sabbath’s “Who Are You?” to further instate a misanthropic edge upon just a facet of the band’s influential perspective. All of this, however, pales in comparison to the epic sweeping finality of the album in the form of “Alchemy of Nine Dimensions.” The nearly 20-minute juggernaut of a track drags, pulls and gnaws on the frail remains of your mind to solidify an air of eventual decay that erupts in seething dismay, before echoing out into a single dissipating lull.
Remembering now that Marching Into Chaos was the first true look that we had into the haunting machine that would become Shadow of the Torturer allows this album to shine through that much brighter. While you may not be able to find a physical copy of the album without an extensive search, it would be well worth the effort to do so. In the meantime, by check it out and see what all the fuss is about.
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