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| 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.
