BelphegorTotenritual

Revenge is a dish best served cold, and it is very cold in Austria. In the Alps, I guess. Belphegor is equal parts frostbitten black metal and bloodthirsty death metal. When the twain meet it spawns a razor-toothed, spiny-backed carnivore.

Ringleader Helmuth has reigned in his black metal shrieks for death metal bellowing since contracting typhoid fever in South America. Yeah, I dunno either. As any black metaller knows, lower means more evil. This hypothesis is tested on The Devil’s Son; an experiment in head-destroying, mosh-battering death metal. Next, Swinefever – Regent of Pigs is pure arpeggio and tremolo worship offered at the altar of the Norwegian underground. It’s not as if the boys flip a coin and decide one song is death, the other black metal. The welds are buffed into the bodywork. It feels like Totenkult – Exegesis Of Deterioration runs with Behemoth’s blasphemous blackened death playbook; which isn’t an altogether bad thing.

Compared to previous works, Belphegor have reined their “distort everything and run the distortion through a shitty four-track” mentality, adding a clinical sheen to proceedings. Well, by their standards, anyway. Example: a freewheeling Spell of Reflection holds melody under murky water just before it expires. Then, they lash that limp body to a horse-drawn hearse and perform its funeral march. Ye olde Belphegor would’ve set the whole thing to puree and let Satan sort it out. Some blast-beats overstay their welcome, but that’s when you get too comfortable in one’s genre. Totenritual goes to show that upping production doesn’t sacrifice intensity. Just sayin’.

STANDOUT TRACKS: Swinefever – Regent of Pigs, Totenkult – Exegesis Of Deterioration & Spell of Reflection
STICK THIS NEXT TO: Rotting Christ, Behemoth & Taake