Behemoth - The Satanist Review

Vinyl Cover of Behemoth's new opus, The Satanist 

Band- Behemoth
Album- The Satanist
Origin- Gdansk, Poland
Score 10/10



For the sake of full transparency, i'll get this off my chest right off the bat- Behemoth is my favorite band. I think that ever since my taste in music really reached the point where it became solidified, and I became invested in the world of Metal, Behemoth began speaking to me. The sense of real grandeur, the heaviness, and the fact that everything the guitar tone, to Inferno's monstrous blastbeats and Nergal's vocals sat perfectly with me through pretty much every release, gave these Polish monsters the status of crown jewel in my musical pantheon.

Yet, there was always a concern. You see, Behemoth are not the type of band which is comfortable with settling. Every release sounds different, at least slightly from its predecessor. From the Pagan/Black Metal style of Sventieth (Storming Near The Baltic) and Grom (which means Thunderclap in Polish,) to the unpolished Blackened Death style of Pandemonic Incantations and Satanica, to their steady upwards slope in Death Metal through Thelema 6 (my personal favorite) to Evangelion. This is not a band which is comfortable staying in one spot. Now, while this is one of the main reasons I love them, it is also always a risk. I have faith in the lads, and much security in their ability to keep evolving well, you never know. For every Enslaved, Amorphis and Watain, or bands who made transitions successfully, there are about 3 Morbid Angels gone trance, Satyricons gone Black N' Roll and Opeths gone Progressive Rock.

So of course, when it came to my attention that my nearest and dearest were having a new album, so soon after Nergal, thank Satan, won his battle with Leukemia, I was both incredibly happy, and incredibly afraid. Especially when Nergal kept throwing around words like “innovative” and “sincere.” Usually when artists start saying that i'm afraid they're going to go on to make a heart breaking and frankly uninteresting record that capitalizes on the “we're trying to be interesting” rather than actually being interesting through the music. Yet, being a believer, I kept my faith in Nergal. The man who brought me Demigod and Thelema 6 deserves some kind of trust, so trusted him I did. So the months went by, promotional images and materials were released , and come December 7^th, there it fucking was.

The first single and video which opens the album, Blow Your Trumpets, Gabriel. Of course, first came the video from them preforming it in Brutal Assault (a Metal festival in the Czech Republic,) there it already sounded good, but damn it, I needed to hear it properly! So, with trepidation, and a heart beat reaching the 200's pretty easily, feeling like my bullets were trying to shoot out of my chest, I clicked on the link to the video on YouTube. Thinking to myself “ this better be good.” Slowly, the songs starts into a mammoth of an opener. The stomping, burgeoning riffs sounded like the gates of a sinister temple opening, with Inferno's drum beat sounding like a beat to this mesmerizing trance. With Nergal supplying the text for this ritual, it became abundantly clear. Behemoth are back, baby.

Fast forward two months of me tapping my table and looking at the calendar like an anxious idiot, the day finally came. February 4^th was a cold, snowy day in New York City (where I was at the time,) and while I knew of the what was happening that day, I initially didn't plan to take place. My resolve was “yeah, I have this and that editions waiting for me at home, I'll just wait. I don't have to get it at launch.” Now that held pretty nicely, but a thought occurred to me “wellllll, I might as well pop into a Best Buy to take a look at it.” Popped in I have, and my resolve last around 4.5 second with the CD in my hand. 10$ are not worth the pain of being in NYC for two weeks and not knowing what this fucker sounds like until after everybody else has.

So, after two months of hearing Blow Your Trumpets, Gabriel (and Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer, but that doesn't fit the order of this review so we'll talk about it later,) I was finally treated to the track which follows that grand entrance into The Satanist's pandemonium. Furor Divinus does justice to its name (Divine Fury) as Nergal sounds enormously angry, as if he was enraged by his time away. The track breaks forward full speed, and begins to shed light on the differences between this album and the few before it. This album, to me, rather than being the per-ordained evolution from Evangelion, is actually closer to a more perfect vision of Satanica. An intelligent, Blackened Death release that is organically mastered and cooked to the point of perfection.

Yet, I feel that the biggest achievement Behemoth have made with this album, disregarding the circumstances which were not easy, is that it is enormously varied. For example, passing onto the third track Messe Noire (French for Black Mass,) you can already see the dynamic of the album. A mid-paced to slow track, with the vocals sounding like a sermon on the street of a Black Plague infested Europe. The tracks open with the line “I believe in Satan!” and the slow guitars laid down behind the vocals somewhat support a “sick” or “plagued” atmosphere. Messe Noire and it's following track, Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer are a show of the exact beauty in the duality of this release. While Messe Noire is one of the least catchy and hardest to digest tracks on the album, Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer is the exact opposite. Easy to digest, beautifully quick and with a unique rhythm, it is absolutely no wonder that this song was picked as the second single from the album. Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer (or, in translation, Prey For Us Lucifer,) starts off sounding almost a bit like Chant of Ezkaton without the the melodic over-layering, but the sound and the drum beat make all the difference. Inferno keeps this really cool and irregular tempo throughout the whole song that actually gave this song the majority of it's personality. Then of course is the epic slow down. Around midway through the song, Orion does this groovy bass bend and Inferno sticks his drum just once as Nergal kicks into a crushing part near the end. Invoking nearly any demon you can think about, the lyrics end with another phrase that stuck with me from this album “the black sun will never set, because it never rose.”

Reaching now into the middle of the album (5^th track out of 9), is the track Amen. Amen is kind of a touch back with newer Behemoth and I actually thought that it purveyed a strong point of brutality that I really enjoyed. In all and all, it is one of the angriest, shortest and heaviest tracks on the album, with lyrics that would turn a nun into a prostitute and a prostitute into Cee Lo Greene. This track kind of takes the other newer Behemoths into the Satanist's era. The Satanist's title track closes what to me is the first part of the album. An epic if softer track, it shows one of the many new “shades of Behemoth” so to speak. For me, the Satanist, alongside with the closing track, O Father, O Satan, O Sun, shows Behemoth bringing a new instrument into making their pieces sound larger life. They do so by making big sounding yet gritty pieces. That are both at once cataclysmic yet relate-able. This is to me is the personification of what Nergal meant by a more personal album. It's not meandering, it's not full of coded messages or lyrics that you have to watch interviews to understand, but rather, it takes some of the earlier philosophy of Behemoth and applies them to a much more personal basis. It is a manifesto in that it applies to people and individuals rather than to specific topics like earlier topics taken up by the band. The album then continues to Ben Sahar (a track title that has my name in it? Supreme points!,) a mid paced romp that most closely is linked on the album with Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer. Fun, and like the track I paired it up with, beautifully headbangable to the point of breaking several joints in your neck. I also think the usage of choirs near the end was an enhancing touch, and unlike when many other bands use it, was done with a great sense of elegance that doesn't feel exaggerated. .



A moment before the end, a breath before the last track of the album I waited a whole 6 years for, comes my favorite track of the album, In The Absence Ov Light. A barrage of The Satanist era heaviness opens this mammoth of a track with a blast, and Nergal wastes no time growling his decayed and grim heart out within moments. This track, like most of the album, is a contradiction. While (alongside Amen,) it contains without a doubt some of the fastest and most brutal riffing and drumming of the album, it also contains a curious and almost Shining-esque acoustic part mid song that changes the whole atmosphere. From a furious attack , the song mellows out almost entirely into the acoustic guitars, with a saxophone accompanying Nergal reading a spoken word speech of sorts in Polish. When the speech reaches it's end, the song takes a split second of a breath before kicking right back into high gear to close off the strongest and for me, one of the most memorable Behemoth songs of recent memory. It absolutely cracked my top ten Behemoth song list of all time, and that list has only been cracked by two The Satanist tracks ( alongside Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer.) Here we are, at the last track. So far, not only Behemoth fulfilled my expectations for their comeback, but they have far exceeded expectations. But now come the last check on the list, the cherry on the icing on the cake, will the last track be great? Will it leave a taste for more? Will it suffer from a “longest track on the album, lets put everything together incoherently” syndrome?

Yes, yes, and obviously, no. O Father, O Satan, O Sun, the closing song, is Behemoth's equivalent of Led Zeppelin's Kashmir (or Immortal's Tyrants, take your pick.) A track that you'd imagine was played in a movie as the camera zooms out onto the sprawling wastelands while the army marches. The track sounds like what you'd imagine describes a conflict, yet the lyrics take that conflict into an internal spot rather than an external spot. On no track on the album, or matter of fact, in Behemoth's career, has the the representation of Satan's philosophical importance in their music been any clearer. An incomplete deity, a deity which is perfect in its imperfection, the Satan described in O Father, O Satan, O Sun represents human rebellion, represents humanities' conflict internal conflicts to develop and seek enlightenment. An allegorical champion for the duality of existence, to show that divine and complete perfection is but an invention used to limit the mind as to stop it from understanding it's own ability to grow in an imperfect state.


As you might've guessed at this point, I believe The Satanist was not only worth the nail-biting 6 years wait, but then some. For 6 years I didn't know what was going to happen, from the band facing the danger of losing it's leader, and to be honest its essence to disease, to the general doubts one has before his favorite band releases a new album, not to mention a comeback album. 6 years later, I realize that it's moments like these, when I can smile such victories rather than sigh a relief, when I got not only the joy of it scratching by and being decent, but the roaring thunder of it being an absolutely excellent release that marks a new chapter in the history of my favorite band, is why i'm so deeply attached to music in the first place. While there's the sadness of failure and the moments of disappointment, the happiness and emotional relevance of seeing the music that you love prevail, is legitimately a feeling which is hard to match.