Cattle Decapitation - 'Monolith of Imhumanity' (Metalblade) 4.5/5

This is the ninth full length release from politically charged Californian death grind metallers Cattle Decapitation and it's a bit of gem.

Musically this album is about as intense and full on as it can get. Cuts like Forced Gender Reassignment, Gristle Licker and the magnificent Lifestalker explode from the speakers with all the brutal force of a unit of the Animal Liberation Front attacking a fur farm. Drums pound out a relentless tattoo whilst guitars scream thrash and shred like a crazed butcher and the vocals of Travis Ryan growl and snarl in vicious righteous fury. If you think the likes of Cannibal Corpse took it to the max then check these guys out, there is none more brutal and none more driven.

Lyrically this album is very much in line with the bands previous releases; tracks about animal rights intermix with vicious attacks on the decadence of western society and the state of the human condition in a ball of very angry social awareness that sock it to 'The Man' in a way few other outfits can hope to match. And in a world where so many of their musical counterparts are STILL banging out endless tunes about corpse fucking and devil worship its a breath of fresh air. I tip my hat to them for that alone.

Highlights? well the aforementioned Lifestalker with it's epic sounding bridge section, the frenzied thrash and pound of A Living, Breathing Piece Of Defecating Meat and the closing cut Kingdom of Tyrants with its vast and deadly dark soundscapes are to my mind the real stand out cuts on offer, but the whole damn album is pretty impressive over all, and it's rapidly becoming a bit of a favourate of mine.

Highly Recommended

For Fans of..... Cannibal Corpse, Black Dahlia Murder, Jon For A Cowboy, Deicide....

Blood Ceremony - 'Blood Ceremony' (metalblade) 4.5/5

Canadian occultic rockers Blood Ceremony have recently signed to Metalblade, and as so often happens with metalblade signings before any new material surfaces there is a little archive raiding, and so we have this re-issue of the bands 2009 debut album.

Now anyone getting this one expecting walls of Behemoth style satanic deathism, or Slayer-u-like devil thrash are going to be in for a big shock. While there is a strong early Black Sabbath vibe haunting this record the most noticeable influences here are more in the Jethro Tull, Black Widow dark folk rock style, with goodly dollops of Iron Butterfly influenced primordial hard rock thrown is as well.

Tracks like The Rare Lord and Into The Coven are all sweet and engaging folk metal work outs with haunting flute solos, jiggy organ passages and seductive female vocals from the hugely talented Alia O'Brien, which perfectly counterpoint the primitive doomy folk metal backing from the rest of the band. The result is an album that sounds like it was conceived and created about 1971 as the sound track for a long forgotten Italian horror movie. And any album that features a short sound clip from the classic Brit biker horror flick Psychomania 'There you go my little green friend' has gotta be alright with me.

In world of metalcore, post thrash, and ham fisted Djentisms, the fact that bands like Blood Ceremony are still out there and recording albums like this comes as a welcome change and a breath of musical fresh air and I for one await their next record with great interest.

A devilshly good album

For fans of... Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Black Widow, Skyclad, Inkubus Sukkubus....

Pilgrim - 'Misery Wizard' (metalblade) 4/5

Until yesterday I knew three things about Rhode Island. 1) It's the smallest state in the union, 2) its the home to a fictional family in a popular US animated sitcom and 3) The place gave its name to a breed of chicken. But now I have a fourth fact, its the place where doom metal titans Pilgrim hail from.

Now Pilgrim are a classic power trio of The Wizard on guitar and vocals, Elric The Soothsayer on bass and a certain Krolg, The Slayer Of Men on drums; and they play doom metal of the darkest and doomiest kind. Imagine the sort of stuff the likes of St Vitus and Candlemass were doing back in the late 80's and you'll get the idea.

Now the first thing you notice about this album is how slow it is. Its SLOW, very slow indeed; so slow in fact it makes a lot of Black Sabbaths early work sound almost speed metal in comparison. In fact its not until half way into the the third track Quest, that the tempo even lifts beyond funeral march speed, when Pilgrim go off on a Witchfinder General style trip for a minute or so before slamming on the breaks again and grinding out the rest of the track in fine funeral metal tradition.

The second thing that hits you it that this album is epic in scope. There are six songs on offer, half of which top the 10 minute mark - in fact only one song, Adventurer (a surprisingly snappy tune that sounds not unlike NWOBHM gods Pagan Alter) comes in at under five (don't go expecting much mainstream radio play guys).

Now I know what your thinking, this has gotta be one boring album. But you'd be wrong in thinking that. Despite the fact this album moves along with all the pace of an arthritic tortoise it still keeps itself very entertaining and listenable. This is partly due to some cleaver production that positions everything in the mix perfectly, with plenty of space around each instrument so every power chord and cymbal splash has room to breath and resonate to maximum effect and turns the whole listening experience into a gloriously dark sound-scape. The other key factor is that the vocals here are clean, not a pig grunt or death groan in sight, this means you can hear exactly what The Wizard is singing about as he spins his dark tales of swords, sorcery, death, damnation and daring do. All of this results in a very entertaining listen that holds the attention for the entire album and makes the whole work stand up to repeated plays.

In short I'm pretty impressed with this album. it's been a while since I last discovered a new doom act of the old school, and a long time since I've found one as good as this. Highly recommended.

For fans of... Black Sabbath, St. Vitus, Candlemass, Pagan Alter, Witchfinder General.....

Cirith Ungol - 'Servants of Chaos' (metalblade) 4.5/5

If I had to select one act to represent the true spirit of underground metal it would be Californian rockers Cirith Ungol. They were formed in the early 70's and for a good few years were nothing but local heroes before getting themselves signed in 1980. Over the next eleven years they issued four fairly obscure but musically remarkable albums before frustration over management and record label issues lead to the bands split in 1992. They were never a critically acclaimed outfit, Kerrang! magazine once named their debut LP 'Frost and Fire' as the worst heavy metal album of all time, yet at the same time they built a cult following far larger than their apparent profile, had a huge world wide fan base and are now hailed as a greatly influential outfit on many of the bands that came after them. Since the split the name Cirith Ungol has been kept alive by a string of compilation releases and even a tribute album from acts who hail them as one of the greats.

Now Servants of Chaos isn't a new compilation.This collection of rare unreleased tracks, demo recordings, live renditions, alternative takes and rehearsal room sessions first surfaced 10 years ago, but to commemorate  the 20th anniversary of the bands demise metalblade have decided to revamp and reissue it, along with a DVD of a 1984 live show to help keep the legend of Cirith Ungol alive and available for the next generation of metalheads.

There are 31 tracks on the audio part of this triple disc set (and 8 on the DVD which didn't come with this review copy so you'll have to check that bit out for yourselves), and it covers the bands entire history from demo versions of tracks that ended up on the Frost and Fire album, right through to a couple of numbers recorded just before the split. Listening through to this album I can't help but be struck by what a great band Cirith Ungol were. There are the ghosts of all the greats in here, riffs that hint at classic Rush, driving metal sections that reference Black Sabbath and Montrose, touches of Led Zeppelin... , all wrapped around some great lyrics that draw from classic fantasy literature as penned by the likes of Michael Moorcock and Fritz Libre. And there's more, just take the double header of Ill Met In Lankhmar and Return To Lankhmar, we have here a couple of tracks that can only be described as progressive metal, yet dating from a time when that genre didn't even exist and the only other band experimenting in the field were the equally cult and obscure NWOBHM outfit Demon.

Playing this one through and once more getting to know great tracks like Master Of The Pit, Chaos Rising, Join The Legion and 100 MPH, you begin to realise that maybe Cirith Ungols problem was the fact that they were too far ahead of their time, I'm sure had they come around ten years later when the whole progressive metal thing was beginning to break through thanks to the likes of Dream Theater, they would have realised their true potential and gained the critical and commercial success they undoubtedly deserved.

Still that is now just speculation, and with various ex-members of the band saying a reformation is most certainly not on the cards (but I for one still live in hope), all we can do is treasure this compilation, enjoy the majesty of what Cirith Ungol were; use it to pass on to younger generations of rockers the mythology of one of the metal undergrounds true greats and keep the name Cirith Ungol alive.

Highly Recommended

For fans of.. Rush, Crowned By Fire, Black Sabbath, Demon etc....

Behemoth - 'Demonica' (metalblade) 4.5/5

It's been a difficult year for classic Polish black metal merchants Behemoth, with main man Adam 'Nargal' Darski fighting off a potentially fatal bout of leukemia all things Behemoth have been put on hold for the past year or so. However the band have taken the opportunity to do a spot of archive raiding. Earlier this year we had the 'Abyssus Abyssum Invocat' compliation which resurrected a few lost gems and unreleased live archive material and now we have this double CD package that looks back to some of their earliest recordings.

Now this is not a new release as such, Demonica first surfaced in 2006 on the Swedish Regain label, but back then it was a very limited pressing of just a few thousand CDs and a few hundred vinyl copies and thus has become a bit of a collectors item. But now it has been re-issued through Metalblade so all of who missed it first time around can enjoy it.

OK I'll confess that I've always had a soft spot for Behemoths intelligent approach to all things doomy and dark and always admired them for the high standard of their music; and listening back to this collection of some of their earliest demo tracks, album out takes and other assorted goodies, I'm more than happy to report that even this primordial stuff from the bands earliest days still shows exactly why Gdansks blackest export are one of the world leaders in their field.

All the bands influences are proudly on show.  We get snippets of early Black Sabbath style riffage, hints of Venom, touches of St Vitus and Paradise Lost, a seasoning of Bathory and Celtic Frost... all the classic ingredients of the trade mark Behemoth sound are on show, and even on the earliest numbers, some dating back to early 1992 they are already being forged into something a wee bit special indeed.

The quality of the musicianship on show is remarkable; its brutal, raw, aggressive and as black as a black cat which has been dropped into a bag of soot; yet at the same time its complex in construction, perfectly controlled and as darkly entertaining as a classic Dario Argento movie.

There are 23 tracks on offer here and I'm not gonna give a track by track breakdown, but a few of my personal highlights are: the Bathory fueled From The Hornedlands to Lindisfarne (you gotta love songs about vikings), the deliciously doom laden Rise Of The Blackstorm of Evil, the Venomesque Cursed Angel Of Doom and the dark and riffy Deathcrush.

Things are thankfully looking up in the Behemoth camp now. Nargal is well on the way to a full recovery, and there is a new studio album and a full European tour in the offering for next year. But in the mean time if you need a black metal fix of the highest quality to keep you going, (or you've not encountered the band before and you fancy giving them ago) then this album (and Abyssus Abyssum Invocat for that matter) are more than up to the task.

Highly Recommended

For fans of ... Venom, Glorior Belli, Bathory, Novel of Sin etc....

As You Drown - 'Rat King' (metalblade) 4/5

As You Drown come from Southern Sweden and play 'extreme death metal'. They have been around for some 8 years and this is their second full length album.

OK, I will question the term 'extreme' here, as there are a lot more bands out there far more extreme than As You Drown, but as for the death metal part, then we do have a good album on our hands here. Now 'Rat King' is allegedly a concept work built around the old European folk law traditions of the King Rat concept, a deep seated myth that has inspired everything from pantomime villains ('Look out Dick Wittington, he's behind you...'), to James Herbert's classic horror novel cycle and even Chas and Dave numbers. What this album has to offer on the lyrical front to this mythos I cannot say.. I'm normally pretty good at picking the lyrics out of death grunts, but this album has beaten me, so I'll just take the bands word about the concept and concentrate on the music itself.

Musically this album ticks all the right boxes for its genre. There's lots of nice interesting thrashy riffs, and the aforementioned vocals my be unintelligible, but they add to the feeling of power an brutality of the over all sound in fine style. All the songs on offer here are pretty good, from the opening cut, Conqueror with is steam-hammer assault and sublime epic breakdown, via aggressively brooding You Should Be Paranoid and ear raping fury of Rabid Wolves In Sheep's Clothing; to the sonic napalm of The Nothing and beyond - there is enough good stuff on offer here to keep yer average death thrash aficionado more than happy. But the albums real killer cut is the closer Cleansing Hands, with its epic build up from almost nothing to a grinding metal climax and then on to a chilling bass synth conclusion.

So over all, this is a pretty good record and one I would recommend to all fans of death thrash everywhere.

For fans of.... Vader, Cannibal Corpse, Job For A Cowboy etc...

Glorior Belli - 'The Great Southern Darkness' (metal blade) 4.5/5

I don't often get much music of French origin troubling my inbox, but when it does it tends to be something worth taking note of. So in the wake of goth outfit Modern Funeral Art and proggers Delusioned Squared (both of whom were album of the year contenders in recent years) I give you this, the fourth full length studio release from Paris based death metal outfit Glorior Belli.

And what an album this is. Right from the opening bars of the first number, Dark Gnosis, it is clear that we are listening to something a wee bit special. the vocals growl and roar like a legion of demons, guitars thrash and churn like satanic dervishes whilst the rhythm section hammer home a Danse Macabre that would blast the very fallen angels out of the deepest pits of hell and into the moshpit. It's as heavy as the gates of Dis, as dark as Beelzebub's own ring piece and and as intense as tripping on mushrooms whilst base jumping off the Eiffel Tower in the mother of all thunderstorms.

Track like Negative Incarnate, Bring Down The Cosmic Scheme and Chaos Manifested, scream out of the speakers and batter you into submission with wave after wave of skull smashing fury. So it continues for the first five tracks, until we reach the mid point of the album and the title cut, a slow and menacing satanic worship tune that lets us gather breath for a few minutes, before the grinding heaviness returns to batter the listener into a bloody but happy pulp just in time for epic and glorious closing number Horns In My Path.

Over all I'm reminded somewhat of classic Filipino death grind outfit Kratornas, and as I'm a huge fan of Cebu's finest export I mean that only in terms of highest praise.

Basically this album is epic in scope, has lyrics like a Dennis Wheatley novel and is packed with dark brutality. What more do you want from a black / death metal album? It's just great.

for fans of... Kratornas, Fleshcrawl, Kronos, October Tide... etc