What I do care about is what is happening on Apocryphal. These Italian Satanists produce something amazing in my ears. Black metal with a lot of variation, fantastic production, fast blasting riffs like no other style can do them, but add some grooving brutal riffs to that and you can get me going. On top of that there are some real atmospheric and original (like I know anything about that) keyboard parts in the songs, and some typical evil vocals that will make your local pastor stop his paedophilic activities and pray for all eternity to a false god. Spoken like a true corpse painted casketfucker. Sorry, it’s still funny to me to ridicule the scene.

 

But that doesn’t take away the fact that I have a fine piece of work that I will actually put in my collection. It’s good to see that not all black metal has to be as underground as possible, nor does it have to be labelled commercial as soon as more than three people you know have heard about them. This album dares to take them also in the direction of some progressive thrash and death metal, and I thank them for this. Weird to me is the fact that they've been around since 1999, but this is their debut album.

 

The only thin I can comment on negatively is that their lyrics are a complete mystery to me. I mean they’re included in the booklet, but I have no idea what this guy is talking about, except for Satanism, death, war, disease, and the other usual Christmas topics. Black metal heads, buy this stuff!! It’s truly grim and necro, but more brutal. ;)