I picked up Pure Black Energy back in 1996, I don’t remember why, and was not really impressed. I ignored the band until they became Khold and everyone was raving about them. I still ignored them until Phantoms, which bored me, and then Mørke Gravers Kammer was not really impressive either. Then the dreadful Krek arrived in my mailbox…

All songs on Biography Obscene are in the three minute range, which is about what they have always done, and the album is a short 35 minutes. They still play primitive dark black metal in roughly the modern Darkthrone way. Newer Satyricon comes to mind as well. Overall slow and monotonous, with vocals that lack much diversity and intensity, is the name of the show. Once again not bad, not great, just plodding along with no intensity and no real desire. There are however some interesting ideas here just nothing really attention grabbing. The change in name back to Tulus has not really helped them any, they still play so called groove metal, though the saxophone on “Demise” was intriguing, and effective on “Biography Obscene,” though I could do without the bizarre female vocals in that track, in all honesty, I could do without the whole album.

This album cover is the best of the bunch, which would not be hard seeing as all the rest were rather pathetic, but they seem to have finally run out of headshots of themselves. If you can only spare the money to buy 1000 cds this year you might want to give this one a pass.

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