Category Archives: Satan

Ghost – Infestissumam (Loma Vista/Republic, 2013)

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Ghost-Infestissumam-april-19The last time I wrote about the Swedish sensation known as Ghost, I stated that the less I thought of them as a metal band, the more I found myself enjoying them. Their debut album Opus Eponymous was released on a metal label (Rise Above/Metal Blade) and featured distorted guitars, but was at its core a pop album; those vocal harmonies were more about The Beach Boys than Mercyful Fate, and the songs themselves were saccharine odes to Satan so addictive that I imagined even Pat Robertson’s wrinkly old Dungeons & Dragons-hating ass would have a hell of a time keeping them out of his head if he were ever exposed. Indeed, Ghost were an anomaly in the metal world; a band that praised Lucifer with the best of them, but did so in a way that actually stood a chance of sending the average joe or jane down ye olde left hand path.

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THKD’s Top 20 Metal Albums of 2012

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2012 has been more stressful than a motherfucker; probably one of the most all-around stressful years of my life. Buying a house + assorted family and work-related issues that I wouldn’t even dream of getting into here managed to turn the year into a goddamn pressure-cooker. I’m pretty sure the only things that kept me alive were my wife’s unwavering love (and limitless patience) and an avalanche of incredible music. In 2011 I was feeling pretty jaded and dissatisfied with the state of heavy metal, this year I found myself feeling better about things than I have in years. That isn’t to say there weren’t great albums released in 2011, there were, but in 2012 I felt like there was so much greatness that I couldn’t possibly keep up with it all.

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Fiends at Feast – Towards the Baphomet’s Throne (Horror Pain Gore Death Productions, 2012)

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Regular THKD readers may recall me championing the living shit out of Santa Cruz’s Fiends at Feast last year after they sent me a copy of their stellar Shadows of Extinction EP (here and here).  At the time, the band were self-releasing their material, which was only available at shows.  A lot can change in just a year; Fiends at Feast now have label backing from the up-and-coming Horror Pain Gore Death Productions and as a result have released a brutalizing debut album in the form of Towards the Baphomet’s Throne, a recording which sees the quintet pushing their music to even more malevolent extremes.
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Weapon – Embers and Revelations (Relapse, 2012)

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To listen to the three full length albums Weapon have released since 2009 is to witness a band searching for their sound.  This is not meant as a knock on the Canadian quartet, in fact quite to the contrary; bands are supposed to evolve and grow from album to album.  This fact is often lost in the context of death and black metal, where more often than not a lazy “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude prevails.  Weapon spit blood and fire in the face of that attitude; they’re ambitious, dedicated craftsmen with world domination on their minds.  Embers and Revelations, the latest in that aforementioned trio of albums, is the band’s most complete and commanding work to date, a work that sees Weapon finding that sweet spot between death metal’s pulverizing violence and black metal’s Luciferian spitefulness; harnessing it to create something totally their own.
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Grave / Dark Funeral / Morbid Angel @ People’s Court, Des Moines IA, 10/07/12

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Morbid Angel, Dark Funeral, Grave; listening to metal in my early teens and twenties, I never imagined such an excellent lineup would roll through my hometown of Des Moines, IA.  When this tour was announced, I found myself checking the dates on several websites just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things and that there really was a Des Moines stop scheduled.  This would be my first time seeing all three bands, and being that all three bands are legendary (at least as far  as my own personal metal pantheon is concerned), I was just as giddy at 33 as I would’ve been at 18 had this lineup desecrated Des Moines back then.
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Aosoth – III (Agonia, 2011)

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I’ve been avoiding writing about Aosoth’s III for some time now.  Why would I avoid writing about such an excellent album, you might ask?  Well, to be perfectly blunt I was intimidated by it.  Intimidated by the idea of attempting to translate its greatness into mere words.  This is no bullshit hyperbole; I honestly believe that III is one of the most enthralling black metal albums of the last ten years; utterly devastating in its frightful, hypnotic magnificence.
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Nyogthaeblisz – Apocryphal Progenitors of Mankind’s Tribulation (SSP, 2012 [reissue])

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There’s raw black metal… and then there’s Nyogthaeblisz.  The trio of Texas black metallers recently garnered quite a bit of press for being kicked off the bill of this year’s Chaos in Tejas fest, due to their affiliation with the Satanic Skinhead Propaganda label (who’s owner described the band as “anti-jew”), appearances on compilations with highly inflammatory titles such as Declaration of Anti-Semitic Terror and a penchant for dressing up like the black metal version of the KKK.  I cannot speak for their ridiculous fashion sense, and I most certainly don’t condone their abhorrent ideology (it seems pretty goddamn absurd that a band that’s supposedly of Hispanic descent would harbor such noxious beliefs), but I can speak for Nyogthaeblisz’s music, which is some the gnarliest black shit I’ve ever heard.
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Occultation – Three & Seven (Profound Lore, 2012)

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I don’t get the “female fronted occult rock” trend that has come out of the metal underground in the past few years.  To these ears, there’s nothing even remotely evil, let alone “occult” about ripping off Jefferson Airplane, Fleetwood Mac and Heart.  Okay, this is the part where someone brings up Coven and I roll my eyes.  I’m not saying the music is particularly bad, it just isn’t my thing, and it definitely isn’t Satanic. I mean, isn’t it really just revisiting the hippie-dippy horseshit that early heavy metal set out to stomp to bits at the end of the ’60′s, only with a quasi-diabolic lyrical bent?
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Midnight – Satanic Royalty (Hells Headbangers, 2011)

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The death of rock ‘n’ roll has been greatly exaggerated.  In the mainstream sure, rock ‘n’ roll is as cold and lifeless as Kurt Cobain’s corpse (yeah, yeah, I know he was cremated, whatthefuckever), repeatedly shot in the face by the malformed and talentless post-grunge spawn of crumbling major labels.  But in the underground, it’s a different story.  Rock music is alive and well in seemingly endless permutations, from stoner to goth to death n’ roll, as raw and dangerous as ever.
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I fucking love Motörhead and so should you.

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I’m pretty sure I first heard Motörhead via Headbanger’s Ball, around the time of the March or Die and Bastards albums. I distinctly remember the video for “Hellraiser” from March or Die making quite an impression on me; Lemmy Kilmister had to be pretty badass to be playing cards with Pinhead. I already loved horror movies when I started getting into heavy metal in the early nineties, so making a connection between my two obsessions made perfect sense, even if Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth didn’t exactly turn out to be cinematic gold.  Also, being already familiar with Ozzy Osbourne’s version of “Hellraiser,” I thought Lemmy must be doubly badass if The Prince of F’n Darkness is stealing his tunes. The Bastards album spawned “Burner,” which is a great song and had a pretty cool accompanying clip in spite of it being a glorified performance video, as well as ”Born to Raise Hell,” which appeared on the soundtrack to Airheads, a horrifically dumb movie  (which I absolutely love) about a metal band holding a radio station hostage.
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