Putrid Invokatiön are a black metal act from California that I became acquainted with after their guitarist/vocalist Trevor (a.k.a. Grave Sodomizer) gave me this 6-track CD-R at Steelfest this year. I had no idea what to expect from this release outside of Trevor's love of Impaled Nazarene, and even that gave me the wrong impression of what this was.

Anyway, Ninety Seconds to Midnight is a chaotic slurry of war metal that's intense and mercilessly brutal, but I have to say it is greatly let down by an awful lo-fi production. I think this might be a rehearsal recording, or at the very least recorded live in a rehearsal room, but even by those standards this goes beyond simply being raw and barbaric and goes into being an indistinguishable wall of noise. That comes off as harsh, and I suppose it is, but truth be told, the band is more than capable of making marvelously brutal noise when I can get past the awful sound quality, and that's enough to make me interested in hearing what they do next. I just hope they have a production that doesn't do everything in its power to hide that fact next time.