Denial of God – The Horrors of Satan - 3/5
http://www.mediafire.com/d
At first, I liked a couple minutes of this album. Now this sets the stage for a really long and pointless intro of just what exactly I’m saying, so bear with me. Normally I have three ways to view a band’s material; I love it, I hate it, I don’t care. A surprising amount fits into the ‘don’t care’ area with some in the hate, and few in the love category. This poses a conundrum with Denial of God. DoG is a solid band, with some decent ideas on how to play BM. These ideas are usually preceded by about a full and complete intro track, and about four minutes of song building to the decent ideas. Normally, this would mean I either hated or didn’t care for this, but when Denial hits their stride, I absolutely love them.
Anyways, the music played is BM, and with nothing short of a sparkling production. The guitar has a nice range from tremolo to riffs that sit between heavy and thrashy. Drumming is normally at a very quick pace, normally when the guitars are in tremolo mode, but when the guitars slow into riffs, and these are beautiful riffs, the drums settle into a normal rock beat the just sounds great. The vocals range from whispers, to raspy growls, to that deep rumbling style of vokills that sounds like some morbid deity is attempting to converse with your sorry ass. This is what it sounds like when Denial plays an actual song, but there is a significant amount of time spent on intro tracks, which include symphonic sounding synth-keyboard track to open the album, to a number of acoustic guitar and whispers tracks, to choral vocalization and a lone keening guitar.
Which leads me to my main beef with the band; his is just ridiculously cliché. Denial of God? The Horrors of Satan? I can forget about your stupid name and album title, but when you have tracks filled with whispers that set the stage for something amazing, please write something that’s not stupid, or at least go the extra mile with the stupidity. ‘Ohh, look a werewolf track, scary’, no and for fucks sake, if you feel the need to talk about fucking lycans, do it in a shriek where I only have to catch every other word of your drivel.
The album really seems to improve as it goes on. Seriously, I had my doubts through the first half, being there was some I liked, simply buried beneath intros and waiting. That being said, I like the last two minutes of The Curse of the Witch and The Book of Oiufael. The Iron Gibbet is where the album starts solidifying, a nice long atmospheric track, with more of a death/doom vibe then Black metal. A Night in Transylvania, while still lyrical insipid, is one of the better tracks, considering how easily it could have been another Cycle of the Wolf. The Horrors of Satan is great, a worthy title-track, combining the death/doom elements from The Iron Gibbet and some pretty good black metal.
Check it out if you’ve got the time for some long-ass tracks and like you BM squeaky clean.
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