Sacrificio - Sacrificio EP (2014)

Strapped with some of the sexiest helmets in Europe, and some of the oldest school jams appropriated in 21st century black metal, the Spaniards Sacrificio attempt to dial back the years to a time where this niche could have been considered more 'innocent', or to be a little more accurate, genuinely diabolical. This effect is sought through a stripped down, raw 80s/90s cassette demo production and by re-purposing the rudest and crudest of aesthetics culled from the bands that were actually there at the time: Bathory, Hellhammer, Mayhem, Sarcofago, Samael, Venom and so forth. This is truly meant to feel like a lost 1st wave black metal demo that someone just randomly finds while searching through the slush pile of some ancient 'zine, but unfortunately its charms are kind of limited to that...and the great cover photo, of course.

See, the problem here is that the riffs are blemished with such bruising predictability that the six tunes never quite establish their own identity beyond just trying to present us with an 'ancestor' to the sounds so influential from that fabled 80s era. Mucked up production aesthetics are a given, granted, so you've got the hoarse and occasionally flanged sounding raw guitars coming in one ear, while the tinny and clunky drums attack from the other. The vocals are in Spanish and the guy has an effective, charnel rasp which is compelling enough in how it vomits out its disgust over the fat grooves, but overall the interaction of the instruments seems a trifle clumsy. Bass guitars are chubby but dull, and ultimately the most compelling part of this is the 'lead' guitars, which are these frivolous, warbling and atmospheric evil note lines, some of which seem entirely sporadic, that just bellow over the mix like smog elementals...if only the rhythms were in the least bit distinct and evil sounding a subtext for these moments, Sacrificio might have proven truly memorable.

Alas, not all the parts here were created equally, and the EP will thrive only as far as its audience is willing to stretch for old school, no-fucks-given black metal of a primordial age when the style was still being polished off. The riffs and beats are straight from the lexicons of Hellhammer, Bathory and Sarcofago, clubbing you over the head with methodic, distorted grooves that don't go very far. Structurally this is the antithesis of ambition, and while I realize that's part of the 'charm' the trio was aiming for, black metal records were perfectly capable of sounding sincere and sinister without having to sound like they were just rolling tape in a jam room. Not that I haven't heard that approach done with some success, but here it's little more than a crutch. A shame, because this band LOOKS pretty cool...the helms, the leather, the chains, the torches, who would NOT want to be friends with them? I certainly would...hell, if these guys went to my high school in 1989 I'd have followed them around and given freely of my lunch money. I just hope when they produce some new material the music will actually live up to the image beyond mere aesthetic choices.

Verdict: Indifference [6/10]

Hellyeah - Blood for Blood (2014)

The suck just keeps on sucking. One might presume that by their fourth full-length album, Hellyeah would at least find themselves capable of aping the least of those works they are trying to emulate, which by my count is Pantera's Reinventing the Steel. Sadly (okay, not so sadly) the few spare riffs of worth spent on this material are intertwined with such mediocre groove/thrash/grunge passages and saccharine bullshit tough guy posturing vocals that I often find them impossible to differentiate. There is appreciable meat and force behind a few of the rhythm guitars, I'll grant the Texan all stars that much, but when all your choruses sound like Phil Anselmo attempting to front Alice in Chains and Black Label Society, you're playing to an audience well behind the times, who has yet to realize that such a union sucks and pretty much always will suck outside of the genuine article...

I'll be a little more fair: they bite off more than Pantera here. For instance, "Demons in the Dirt" has a mechanistic rhythmic callback to something you'd hear on Prong's Cleansing, tunes like "Moth" might has well been sent over to Nickelback or Hoobastank to plague the radio channels, and there are even a few clean guitar passages here which sound like something In Flames would have woven into some of their signature melo-death. But it's all so pasteurized, so meek, so 'Ozzfest 1997' that I could not listen through this with a straight face. Once in a while, a riff with some genuine heft will arrive and then quickly become marginalized by the garbage 'catchy' chorus which isn't so catchy, the emotional self-touching of Chad Gray which will no doubt inspire BMX rallies and WWE walk on themes for the next decade. So heavy, bro! That thick, credulous guitar tone recycling groove metal is perfect to pump me up during my next CrossFit training session. Maybe they'll play some of this in between the next Monster Truck session at the muddy local arena-grounds.

Do we still really live in a world where people think shit bands like Stone Sour and Disturbed fucking matter at all? Because if we do, this should go multi-mega platinum! I feel like this is a symptom of musicians remaining well out of reach (err, out of touch) with reality. Look: some trends or styles or distinct individual bands are everlasting. Iron Maiden? Forever. Judas Priest up to 1990? Timeless. Ride the Lightning? Right on. The chum-sucking detritus starving for creativity in the wake of records like Far Beyond Driven and A Vulgar Display of Power will not, and even if Vinnie Paul has more of a right to this obese bucket of swill than anyone else can claim, it doesn't mean he shouldn't leave it for the fishes and do something worth a damn. The guy has the chops here of a glam metal drummer, lazy rock beats with an occasional feat of exertion when they start to get heavier. Okay, there's a little deja-vu in that statement, but we all know he's capable of being a part of something greater than this, and I'm not saying jump back on the Pantera bandwagon, but perhaps start something that is more than the sum of a self-caricature. This is like Five Finger Death Punch (one of the worst bands on Earth), albeit with a few more genuine thrash riffs mixed in. Blood for Blood...you couldn't even come up with a half-decent title. Lone star sharks with blunted teeth.

Verdict: Fail [2.5/10]

http://www.hellyeahband.com/

Equilibrium - Erdentempel (2014)

Equilibrium face the same challenges as most of their pagan metal peers, that is that their audience seem just as much comprised of LOTR nerds, LARPERs and big budget fantasy MMO/wargamers who have little interest in metal beyond a handful of bands whose huge and glossed productions and lyrical topics drag them in, as it does of loyal underground headbangers. That said, these Germans have done better than most at keeping the cheese above the belt, the songs ale-frothy and riff-heavy enough to sate those who are just not going to be impressed by the charging horn section synthesizers so critical to their central aesthetics...

They've never written their masterpiece, and it's unlikely they will...the closest was probably their sophomore Sagas 2008 which was convincingly charming in all its belligerent bravado, like flipping through a Game of Thrones paperback and scoring it mentally with the most absurdly overt 'what would this battle scene sound like if Hollywood were all metal, all the time' mentality. But it's fun, fun in that same way you might have enjoyed Ensiferum's output or the first Wintersun. Kinetic, technically competent pagan war metal for dorks (and I am not excepting myself, I liked it). Their other albums have more or less gone for the same fruit on the true, albeit less successfully, so with Erdentempel, I at least hoped they could get back on the horse and play at the level they had half a decade ago. Musically, I feel this is the case, since the guitar progressions here are very involved, spry and semi-complex so that your imagination won't hit a dead end the moment you begin to filter through them.

That said, the band remains heavily centered on the cavalry-charge keyboard-wind tones, which are truly the 'lead' instrument in that they will hit you first, and this right here will continue to make it or break it for those who have been on the fence for their past material. Structurally, this is a step past the last LP Rekreatur in the stickiness of individual guitar patterns, with a lot of tempo variation and melody to compensate for a few of the generic chugging patterns the Germans are still occasionally prone to. There are also, sadly a few pretty generic melodies as in "Waldschrein" of the 'triumphant' variety you'd find in midlist film & television scores or Nightwish songs, glorious and grandiose only on the condition that you've had your ears shut for the last 30 years of symphonic orchestration in media. Yet, like the first Turisas album or its own forebear Sagas, I feel that there's still enough 'fun' here, throughout the superficial alehouse bombast, that you can wrench a smile or two. Especially if you think bands like Korkiplaani or Amon Amarth are the be-all-end-all of extreme metal music, then you'll probably think this is genius...in reality, they put a lot of work into it, but it's not even remotely that clever.

I didn't like the vocals, at least the snarls of Robse (his second full-length in the roster), they seem quite suppressed by the victorious keyboards and sort of cut and paste with a lot of other growlers and snarlers who don't possess a lot of distinctiveness. But apart from that, and the fact that one out of every four series of notes are almost groan-inducing, I didn't have much of a problem with the album, because frankly I did not go into it with high expectations. They do a sort of 'party while jousting on a pony' pagan metal and they do it fairly well. LCD Wagnerian jousting music for 'Renaissance Faires' in North American backwaters. The mix is brightened to modern standards, and there's very little convincing combat grime and filth anywhere, but they do play as if they're on fire and and can't strip their suits of plate mail armor down to the lederhosen beneath quite fast enough. For fans of this niche of bands, that should prove more than enough, because let's face it, sometimes you just wanna pound down your overpriced mug of cheap festival beer while you watch all the cleavage flowing freely from the corsets passing by (or those tight leather breeches, ladies)...and this is the musical equivalent. Hey, asshole: lighten up, peace bond those replica weapons, have a turkey leg, and bring the kids at half-price.

Verdict: Win [7.25/10] 

http://equilibrium-metal.net/en/

Samael - Aeonics - An Anthology (2007)

If Aeonics wasn't inevitable, then I don't know what is. Like other 'top shelf' metal record labels (Roadrunner, for example), Century Media has a history, especially over the last 10-15 years, of putting together anthologies of reprinted material to lure in suckers (i.e. listeners new to the band, or utter completionsts). They even tried to get me on the hook by visually stimulating the simplistic celestial body cover imagery that so worked for their masterpiece Passage. Of course, this is no simple cash in, on the very word of the label itself: This album is not a simple cash-in Best-Of CD, but a sophisticatedly and carefully arranged collection of musical milestones spanning SAMAEL’s entire career. The album contains 19 tracks (clocking for over 79 minutes), which as a whole transport all the uniqueness of this black & gothic metal pioneers. Sold, guys! I'll take two copies, in case I wear one out...

Sure, it comes packed with a big pictorial booklet and was assembled in collaboration with the band, but it's nothing more than songs picked off previous products, and in many cases not even working together in unison. For instance, I can't envision how their electronic/experimental stuff off Era One/ Lessons in Magic #1 necessarily fits in with the rest, being that it wasn't originally going to be put out under the band's name, and it's surely not going to give a prospective listener an accurate picture of what the band is generally all about. There are loads of amazing songs here, don't get me wrong, but "Moonskin" and "Rain" are best experienced with Passage, and the same goes for the rest. By taking and transplanting these few tunes from their original contexts you are almost teasing the hypothetical that they're 'best of', which is not necessarily the case for the Passage, Blood Ritual or Ceremony of Opposites material and these are all albums that need to be experienced in full to properly appreciate. Even Worship Him deserves that level of attention, so I feel confident in saying that Aeonics doesn't even have enough heft to serve as a door stopper.

It's also a missed opportunity, because instead of just squeezing a career anthology onto a single 80 minute disc, they could have had a 2-3 disc treatment, with perhaps an album of all the band's demo content, a live set, a collection of covers, electronic/symphonic remakes of older tunes (like the disc Xytras did of Passage without the metal elements), or even just remastered or recorded songs that bring the earlier, crude stuff up to speed with the latest material. Granted, purists tend to loathe such things, and I'm often one of them, but ANYTHING except photographer credits to exhibit that some effort was placed into this, some love for the band's fans, going above and beyond to give them something extra...a true and proper celebration of the Swiss band's career, which was, at least for the first decade and change, a truly wonderful and magnanimous musical evolution. But, no, we've got a product that might have just been some label intern randomly handed a stack of Samael CDs and told to pick out and randomly distribute tunes into an arbitrary track order that I assume was meant to fabricate some 'emotional' strength...but really doesn't anymore than my IPod 'shuffle' function. I do like the artwork and the booklet, its sleek and stylish and oh so metro-Samael, but what if this had just been a new album, dropping the 'subtitle' of 'An Anthology' and presenting us with Passage II (they'd do this later, but one can imagine). Anyway, enough of my pipe dreams...if you have any intention of buying this, strike yourself in the temple hard with a blunt object. Otherwise, I shepherd thee back to sample and/or purchase the first five albums and leave it at that.

Verdict: Epic Fail [.25/10]

http://www.samael.info/Above/index.html

Samael - On Earth EP (2005)

...and onto part two of my three part series on Samael's most useless recordings, the On Earth EP was the second and I believe last such release to come out through the Swiss group's own label, called Galactical. One would have hoped to hear a lot more of their experimental recordings and side-projects through this imprint, but they were rather quick to call it a day in just about two years time, and if it was just going to end up an outlet for maxi singles such as Telepath and On Earth, we can be thankful. Granted, this one pretends to have a little more meat to it than its predecessor, if only because it avoids the 'karaoke' single/EP tag, and features a few tunes you weren't going to find on Reign of Light whatsoever. Joyous day.

"On Earth" itself is a direct continuation of the style from Passage and Eternal, mid paced, darkly and cosmically industrial; only Vorph's vocals are more pronounced and robotic. Like much of the album it hails form, the guitars are more or less regressions towards patterns the band had already written for the prior full-lengths, even if the precise notes are different, there's a lot of reliance on heavy, simple chords that follow the beat. This also suffers from the 'worldly syndrome', like they basically list off a bunch of cities in which their fans live, so we can all just be a big and happy fucking family. What the FUCK, Samael?! Why did you have to go all hippy on us? One world? Our world? What is this, a lost Michael Jackson tape? At any rate, the lyrics basically abolish any real chance of me taking this tune seriously, but if not for that then it would be a semi-serviceable Passage outtake that would have felt as if it were scrapped for other, genuinely excellent songs. I'm not averse to that positive, Romantic undercurrent Samael tapped into for their 21st century stuff, but it doesn't really excuse the shoddy and underwhelming songwriting.

As with the "Telepath" treatment on the prior EP, the remix of "On Earth" here is laughable at best, not danceable enough for the Euro EBM/Goth metallers who might care, and not harsher enough for the long since lost Samael fanbase off the first few albums. "Auf der Erde" is a German lyric version of the title track, and while it might benefit from the vocals sounding less dopey to those who can't speak the language, it's otherwise the same (i.e. the cities listed off). So really the only hope for the disc is the cover of Depeche Mode's "I Feel You", and in this too they fail, because hearing Vorph's sustained growls over an excessively industrialized rendition of the original with some spacier sounding guitars is incredibly goofy. Where Moonspell did a pretty kickass cover of "Sacred" that I still listen to, Samael's attempt fails to ever really launch, even if the pairing does make some sort of sense. But as lackluster my reaction, I would be remiss not to admit that this was the most entertaining point of the EP...the video for "Telepath" is included, but is nothing more than Vorph standing around, looking 'cool'...ugh. Anyway, the cover image is tacky (with that gold tinged logo...), the music is not good, just put it on the demolition list along with its predecessor.

Verdict: Fail [2.5/10] (dancing with the hidden tribe)

http://www.samael.info/Above/index.html

Samael - Telepath EP (2004)

Telepath is the sort of redundant waste of molecules I always rue seeing from my favorite acts, and yet by 2004, Samael had long been a band established enough that both labels and their own personal enterprises would attempt to con some of the audience for just a little extra scratch. What we have here is essentially what I dub a 'karaoke EP', with a number of tunes lifted directly from an upcoming full-length studio album and then mimicked with their own instrumental versions. "Telepath" is actually represented on this three times, the third being a remix of an already electronically propulsed techno/black metal track, but honestly there's just no fucking reason to have this unless you REALLY want to karaoke to "Telepath" and "Inch'Allah" with your friends at a faux-vampire key party in the comfort of your own posh living room...

I'll go into the studio tracks more with a review of Reign of Light, but "Telepath" more or less tries to grasp at the mystique of Samael's brilliant Passage record (and its followup Eternal) but apply it to a more directly danceable beat, which ironically has a bit of a Gothic/Middle Eastern mashup feel to it adorned in Vorph's salacious grumbles and some baseline chugging. Ironic because you'd expect that out of the song called "Inch'Allah", but wait...that track does it too, only the throbbing beat is affixed with some of the synthesizers the band used so well on Passage. The issue I have here is not simply one of style...I was fully willing to follow this Swiss band almost anywhere, but only that their sense of exploration has been dampened, cheapened for the Euro-goth in the corset on the dance floor and no longer a poetic light on the edge of an infinite span of darkness (i.e. Passage). The riffs in these two tunes are quite lacking, with or without the vocals, as presented, and they seem to have slowly gone from truly compelling guitar lines to banal bouncing chugs circa Rammstein. The remix is so bloody uninspired that I had long forgotten it was even here...

This was all mixed with pretty cutting edge audio and it might hold some appeal for that reason, but since the material is very much redundant with Reign of Light, a 'sinker' of an album which I for some reason enjoyed for a few months and then totally turned traitor towards, I can see no viable benefit to owning it beyond the aforementioned desire to bark out Vorph's lyrics yourself. The lyrics to the tune "Telepath", which I'll complain about at length elsewhere, are the sort of insincere, implausible sorts of 'positive outreach' affirmation ravings that you'd expect from a self-help tape, and sound incredibly cheesy coming from a band that used to sing about Satan and horror and evil on their first few discs. But I'd forgive that if the music was good...it just doesn't hold up, and not solely because of the aesthetic choices, but because the majority of the riffs and vocals are mundane and have little of the emotional gravitas I once felt so strongly from their music. Avoid this, and if you happen to see a copy of the digipack out in the wild, give it a swift kick for me.

Verdict: Fail [2.25/10] (format our comprehension)

http://www.samael.info/Above/index.html

Rippikoulu - Ulvaja EP (2014)

Rippikoulu was (and is) an obscurity which benefited greatly from the gradual identification and gratification of the retro Finnish death metal scene, a phenomena which followed closely on the heels of their neighbor Sweden. The Musta seremonia demo (released back in 1993) has slowly worked its way through the more discriminate internet fanbase and accumulated something of a cult status, though back in the 90s you were very unlikely to have heard of the group unless you were local, or at least pretty goddamn thorough in your tape trading and attention paid to the underground acts hailing from smaller scenes. I can't say I was ever in love with that demo..it's a decent doom/death hybrid considering its origins and the novelty that they were one of the first bands of the style using their native language, but did it resonate with me as much as the debuts of Demilich, Sentenced, Convulse or Demigod?

Nah, but people are so damned obsessed about unearthing raw old bands that sound like other bands they equate their own tastes with, that the tape was a shoe-in for some level of notoriety. And who can blame them? Had the convenience of widespread online communication existed in 1993, the landscape might have looked far different for Rippikoulo, but as it turned out, the band was shelved in '95 after the passing of their guitarist. 21 years later, after most of the other major players in this regional niche have either reformed (or disappeared after many years of success), they now return with a new, three-track EP through Svart Records, a cult-gone-new artifact that I can't imagine is going to shake the faith of their existing followers, but instead possibly swell their ranks to just about any person who appreciates the morbid paradigms of traditional Finnish death metal as filtered through the lens of a quartet of atmospheric doomsayers. That's not to infer that I found this all that compelling in the end, but Ulvaja is nothing if not consistent. Gut wrenching rhythm guitar lines drowned in melancholic, melodic sensibilities and enforced with synthesizers, raucous death growls and a production which surpasses demo fare but still clings to those rough edges...you won't find the castration of studio cleanliness here, just churning cemetery soil and suffering.

I have to  hand it to the Finns for keeping the structure somewhat diverse...the songs range in length so that you can't really accuse them of endless cycles of tedium, though there are points which tried my patience. Ulvaja honestly hovers somewhere between the funeral doom of their countrymen (successors) Shape of Despair, and the ominous death of Convulse or Purtenance, with the caveat that the use of keys, synthetic choirs, and cleaner tones renders them in a marginally more accessible gray area than the ceaseless opaque despair characterized by any of those acts. It's all enormous sounding due to the huge, dingy tones, but rather than feeling subterranean these tunes breathe across moors, where the limitations of visions are the mere vapor of mists. Granted, the raunchiness of the rhythm guitar tone isn't married to any sort of unexpected note placements or progressions, and there is nothing interesting or nuanced about how they approach the style when compared against any of their peers...they don't exactly conjure up the dreary vistas of old Paradise Lost, the lamentations of My Dying Bride, or the crushing emotional grandeur of something like Tiamat's Wildhoney, but this is not a medium in which a lot of innovation occurs these days, so it's more about sufficiency...

Which, at the very least, Rippikoulu exemplifies with this material. The growls are fulsome but not distinct, the guitar lines putrid but pretty as a pale moon, the drums tinny and supportive, and much of the atmosphere created through the 'orchestration'. These songs aren't quite so disgustingly oppressive and crushing as what I remember of the Musta seremonia, which I felt was like a hybrid of Winter and old Godflesh, but neither are they fields of daffodils on a warm afternoon. I felt a little of their weight, but not a lot of their worth, so ultimately I did not come away impressed; however, as a band returning after a two decade absence, they certainly do not come across as incompetent or out of touch with what the prospective audience is going to wish to hear. Will be interesting to see how the fans of the old tape respond to this, though I don't imagine it would provoke much disappointment.

Verdict: Indifference [6.5/10]

http://koti.mbnet.fi/rippikou/

Samael - Blood Ritual (1992)

Blood Ritual was my first experience with Samael. It must have been around the time I was 18-19, and the black metal selection here was still fairly limited; beyond Bathory and Darkthrone there were only a handful of albums I owned in the style, and while I might have read a snippet or two from a zine about this Swiss band, I purchased the tape largely on the strength of Axel Hermann's cover artwork and the fact I was digging into those early Century Media releases/licenses with a passion. It was around the same time I was first checking out bands like Tiamat, Asphyx and Despair, but among all of those, I recall having the strongest reaction to this particular album, which in retrospect is a solid step above the debut Worship Him in every conceivable department with the exception of possibly 'cult importance'. Note that I'm not exempting myself from that consideration, since the personality of the debut easily precludes it from the near-mediocrity of its riffing, but Blood Ritual even gets that right.

This is probably the last of Samael's recordings to heavily feature the influence of their countrymen Celtic Frost/Hellhammer, contorted into an evil and grainy guitar tone that is immediately more appealing to me than the dryer, reverbed rhythm guitars on Worship Him. Construction of the chords and chugged mutes here is not only flavored with a mildly more unpredictable, vile sense of purpose which embraces a slightly more black/thrash balance than on the prior album, which was overtly a marriage of heavy/doom metal with the emergent black metal of Europe. Don't worry, there are still strong traces of that style here, on plodding tunes like "Macabre Operetta" which almost feel like outtakes from the debut, but even there the riffing, while predictable has a richer sense to it through the tone, and the slightly better bass lines support the guitars. Blood Ritual also maintains that steady, warlike pacing akin to Bathory and Barathrum, but tunes like "Beyond the Nothingness" and the title track definitely bring out a stronger presence of inspirations like Slayer and Obituary, with the rich palm muting, evil dynamics and potential to occasionally explode into a faster, pent up rage falling somewhere between the more plebeian Teutonic and Bay Area thrash 6-8 years prior. They don't stick or sink every riff on the thing, but the tunes are better balanced, more melodic and I certainly find it easier to recount them on an individual basis than the band's 80s-penned material.

One other area where the sophomore exceeds its forebear is in Xytras' growing abilities in sheer composition. Piano and ambient interludes abound here, offering deeper immersion into the nihilism and blasphemy which compels the lyrics. This is an important foreshadowing for most of the future albums in their catalog, specifically the next two after this, which for me represent the band' creative and qualitative summit. But due to the clear, superior production, the cleaner instruments really mesh well into the heavier pieces, which don't rely so much on atmosphere to squeeze by, but the richness and polish and warlike confidence of numbers like "With the Gleam of the Torches", "Beyond the Nothingness", or "After the Sepulture" which I'm led to believe is probably the most popular single tune from this disc. While I would define Blood Ritual as blackened, simplistic thrash with a lot of emphasis on the rhythm instruments and regal/infernal bombast, it also offers a slightly less bestial, messy and incendiary vision of the style than a lot of the other stuff which was coming out through labels like Osmose. This is a disc which almost always takes its time, allowing Vorphalack's hybrid of rasping and growling to offer more of a narrative context than raving lunacy.

Consistent enough that I find it somewhat difficult to choose favorites, this shares with the debut that sense of  timelessness. It's quite rudimentary, fundamental, and I can't imagine it could benefit from having a more contemporary production upgrade. Ironically, a band that often reminds me of this period of Samael is Triptykon, who often writes what in this era feel like pretty bland riffs, steeped in this crushing, massive modern tone which explains about 90% of hype for it. Tom G. Warrior seems to have taken a page from the very band that emulated his own alma maters, but despite the lack of age and rust upon this thing, I'm not sure the riffs here would be quite so interesting had Blood Ritual come out in the 21st century. For its day, this was a rather unique recording...apart from the Greeks, and a few crude American acts, much of black metal was heading in a more accelerated and intricate direction. Samael shared some of the symphonic inspirations with several of the German and Scandinavian second wavers, but how they structured the riffs and grooves in their material was more distinctly linked to that lumbering low-fi thrash and speed metal of the 80s. Blood Ritual would soon be eclipsed by the excellence of the band's continued developments, but this still remains one of their finest albums, and easily the best looking.

Verdict: Win [8.75/10] (where suffering is the only satisfaction)

http://www.samael.info/Above/index.html

Samael - Worship Him (1991)

Worship Him is aesthetically the full-length expansion to the style of the Medieval Prophecy EP, but the intervening years had been put to good use in prepping that and newer material for a higher production value that would, in my estimation, render it far more effective and resonant. We're still hearing what ranks among the crudest of Samael's content, but it's refined to the point that it doesn't sound like a suffocated soundboard demo from a rather mediocre rehearsal room session. This is also the most distinctly 'black metal' of their records, obvious with the daemonic cover art and occult/horror lyrical content, but I should qualify that a little further, for these Swiss did not exactly walk the same left hand path as so many of their European counterparts...

Whereas might find, in the evolution of Greek black metal, a huge influence of melodic heavy metal riffs on the older recordings of Rotting Christ, meshed in with the darker lyrical themes and harsh vocals, so too do they appear here, only they feel more strictly chord-based, like the dirtier early 80s stuff by Manowar, Witchfinder General or other legends who weren't always known for having the best of production. Burly, driving chord progressions that teeter on the predictable, but where these guys deviate is in their huge Hellhammer influence. We might argue that if anyone had a right to ape Tom G. Warrior's seminal extremity, it was his own countrymen, though by this time Darkthrone had already been shifting in this direction. That said, where Fenriz and N. Culto took those primal grooves, distorted and froze them beneath a winter moon, Vorphalack plays a lot more cleanly, with some fairly obvious riff choices even for their day (even for the late 80s). So, to an extent, I have to say I always found the guitars on this record to be among the least compelling of Samael's career, but Worship Him compensates with its slight sense of novelty...for 1991, this was pretty fucking fresh and diabolic sounding even if you couldn't get past the 50/50 hit/miss ratio of the guitars.

But definitely some heavy metal here, some of that Hellhammer/Celtic Frost primordial doom and drudge-thrash with some occasional forays into a mid-to-fast pace more reflective of what most other trailblazing black metal acts were producing (i.e. "The Black Face"). The drums were rarely 'extreme', more of a steady barrage of simple beats or double-kick batteries that supported the obsidian bluntness of the chords, with a handful of warlike cadences that I found eerily reminiscent of material from Bathory's classics Under the Sign of the Black Mark and Blood Fire Death (like those breaks in "Knowledge of the Iron Kingdom" which remind me of the title track to the latter). Masmiseîm's bass lines here are largely unimpressive, following along dully to the rhythm guitar cards with an occasional, but at least the tone helps to fatten up the slower, doomed riffing sequences. The rhythm guitar tone is not too saturated, almost at times like early Candlemass with a little more flange or reverb, some snail paced chugging, but despite the baseness of the composition they still manage to sound quite evil more often than not, because it just has no sense of foundation of melody, warmth or friendliness anywhere. Just a steady, damned march into the abyssal pits...the most peppy this gets is the vile thrashiness of a tune like "Morbid Metal".

Vorphalack really ties this all together with his snarl, and the guy has always surprised me, because in reality he has one of the least pronounced, occasionally garbled sounding harsh vocals in all that old wave of black metal. He doesn't have a ton of sustain to his rasp, nor is he the most wretched or sinister, but there's this sort of messy, 'no-fucks-given' inflection in his reverbed barks which almost makes Samael feel like some sort of snotty, highbrow black metal ritual, and I do not at all mean that as anything other than a compliment. The album speaks to me as if it's 'better than me' without the band ever even giving a fuck or trying too hard, especially as half the lyrics are depressingly simple (like the title track itself with its repetitious lines of "He is.../he is..."). Not sure if that will make much sense to anyone, but it ultimately contributes a charming, sadistic personality to what is often a fairly barebones and commonplace set of riffs exploring the more layman hybridization of black and doom, a natural extension of Hellhammer's morbidity after Celtic Frost had already more or less folded post glam-phase.

Now, this wasn't my first Samael full-length, instead one step in reverse, and it did take me some time to develop any appreciation, because in the early 90s I was still so heavily focused on the brilliance and intricacy of well-written thrash, death and power metal riffing that a lot of these slower, atmospheric-dependent records were not showpieces in my personal wheelhouse. Amazingly, this one seems to only grow more effective with age, not that it's amongst my favorite or even my half dozen favorites in this band's canon, but there's just something supremely pure and puerile about it that I can still lose myself in after so many years. The weird little touches like the ambient interlude "Last Benediction" or the pure doom instrumental "Rite of Cthulhu" only add to the gloomy, black magic aesthetic pulsing through the songwriting of the longer metal tracks. In the end, this is just one of those flawed, beloved black & white cult classics of its style...not nearly the masterpiece some stingy genre purists would paint, but an unassailable transition between the 'first wave' of European black metal (which wasn't really black metal as we know it) and the acts that would evolve that diversified darkness into its own established medium.

Verdict: Win [8/10] (he is the hangman's rope)

http://www.samael.info/Above/index.html

Samael - Medieval Prophecy EP (1988)

Now this is a tough one, because on the one hand, Medieval Prophecy is the nastiest shit Samael has ever recorded. On the other, the 'shit' unfortunately extends to its production and songwriting values; not that these particular tunes don't lend themselves pretty well to their respective re-recordings (on the debut album), but here in this most primal of forms they are nothing more than a glorified demo which sounds like arse, with just two original tunes and one more that represents their chief influence and countrymen (Hellhammer), but is performed with such primacy that you don't feel all that different than when listening to Tom G. Warrior and crew demo it...

I'm sure there is a stingy minority out there which feels as if this EP is the greatest thing the Swiss have ever recorded, but I'm inclined to disagree based on the fact that the drums sound like shit, the guitars aren't much better, and the only real standout is in hearing Vorphalack spit out the gnarliest conventional black metal rasps of his entire career. As an example of uncompromising, atavistic black metal, Medieval Prophecy has very few peers...Bathory and Deathcrush, but both of those actually exceeded this then-duo's compositional ability by leagues, and where the crude mix might have worked wonders for the Mayhem EP, it actually cripples Samael completely. The chord patterns are already so simplistic and uninvolved that making them sound like two 12 year olds down the block recorded them in one of their dad's sheds just reeks too highly of amateur hour. Yeah, yeah, it's so misanthropic and rebellious and REAL, man...but ultimately just too impetuous and raunchy.

The style here was more or less a prehistoric concoction of black and doom metal with more than a passing nod to Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, only with any of that group's eclectic nature stripped to a primordial, sickening occult core. Chord, rasp, chord, rasp, into damnation. The Satanic, zealous lyrics (of "Into the Pentagram") seem several orders of magnitude more advanced than the musical ability, but that's not saying a whole lot. Riffs have hooks in them, but only the sort that slowly and gradually creep upon you, thanks to how drawn out the first cut feels. It's atmospheric mainly to the extent of its rawness, and how it takes its sweet time getting anywhere, but also there are superficial flourishes due to the cleaner, affected guitars wound through "The Dark". In both cases, I have an infinite preference for the more polished renditions on Worship Him, not only because are given more room to breathe in the less suffocated non-mix, but also because I rather think Vorph has a more distinct and unusual vocal bark there. Medieval Prophecy is sort of charming, at times, but I'm not surprised that the band themselves would take the necessary steps towards professionalism.

Of course, having the original of this 7" provides bragging rights for those concerned with their early bird status in the black metal audience; there's an inherent, collectible nature to the EP, with the black and white artwork on both the original and (superior on the) second pressing, and such releases will always maintain a following who treasure them, but in terms of pure enjoyment, I find this somewhat lacking. It's evil as fuck, sure, but I'd say that was largely by the mistake of the recording sounding so swollen and uneven and not something Vorph and Xytras had really mapped out in advance. Still, you wanna hear a band travel a long way, it's interesting to compare this to their later, industrial infused, life affirming lyrical content. Some will favor the humble roots, but I was always a bigger fan of the band the further they got from Earth...well, not TOO far from Earth, but drifting in close proximity. Hint, hint.

Verdict: Indifference [5.5/10] (paralysed by the anguish of a new day)

http://www.samael.info/Above/index.html