Hail Victory

I started exploring this act’s dark satanic art pretty much from the beginning, with their first rite from the year 1992. Title-wise it boded images of vulgar black metal atrocities, but on the music front the band had acquitted themselves with perfectly acceptable slab of vintage Floridian death metal, the guys’ penchant in inserting short non-musical narratives/intros between the actual compositions somewhat an acquired taste, but not terribly ruinous. Cause the music mattered on all counts, evenly split between fast-paced violators and heavy doom-laden marches, a formula successfully and faithfully applied on the sophomore “Lex Talionis”, arguably the band’s finest presentation, and a major statement of both musical and lyrical intent by the band founder and mainman, the notorious ex-member of the Church of Satan and the leader of the 90’s occult organization “Order of the Evil Eye”… Mr. Vincent Crowley.

The material presented on the album reviewed here is near-identical to the one served on the “Satanic Victory” EP released a few months earlier, minus the staple intros, and hardly shows Crowley at his best. This is strictly a doom metal-fixated recording, which is probably not an all-out surprise provided that the band have never been the fastest-playing one in the world, but here the insistence on the hypnotic and the monotonous becomes overbearing before long. Provided that musical variety is scarce, the staple intros don’t seem to be as effective anymore since they follow one ponderous doom-laden march after another, the bouncy more dramatic “Unholy Praises” trailed by two impossibly clumsy dragging pounders (“Seven Deadly Sins”, “Satanic Erotica”), after which an emergence of a fast-paced invigorator becomes mandatory, “Prayer of Hell” manifesting itself in exactly that fashion, a prototypical violent deathster which unbridled velocity is later matched by “Alla Xull”, a new track, the other unfamiliar tune being “One With Darkness” at the end, the next-in-line cumbersome doomy experience.

Vitality is by all means lacking here, intentionally or not, the Crowley team feeling relaxed, or plain lazy if you like, regurgitating old material which wasn’t anything to die for in the first place, not to mention that it was released just a few months prior. The man’s venomous threatening, shouty vocals are intact, though, as is the really cool stylish lead guitar work; but those ingredients simply don’t have the requisite impact accompanying a monotonous one-dimensional procession which, thankfully, doesn’t stretch for too long: if we remove the intros and the outro we’ll have actual music of a bit above half-hour. Again, we’re not talking the fastest-playing team on Earth, but this particular collection adds little to the band’s repertoire, also seeing Crowley kind of losing his creative flair, his initially intriguing tricks wearing out quite quickly, barely by the time of the third charm’s release.

The good news is that the band did pick up steam afterwards, although the follow-up “Anti-God, Anti-Christ” was a less-than-30-min offering, the gimmicks excluded, and didn’t add up to much. Said gimmicks were gone for “Those Who Have Risen”, a solid slab of retro death metal steel, and have never been used again. Crowley continued marching on the contemporary metal scene with effective but fairly irregular death/doomy strides, until 2019 when he announced the demise of Acheron. He’s split his two passions now, leaving the death metal histrionics for Infidel Reign (two full-lengths so far), a formation he put up together with lads from the Dutch Asphyx; and notching up the doom with the band under his own name, where other more recent members of Acheron can also be noticed; the only opus (“Beyond Acheron”) so far being high-class doom, with shades of death of course, coincidentally recalling another “beyond” act, also Dutch, Beyond Belief. Yep, believe it or not, Vincent Crowley holds himself with dignity on the modern metal horizon, his split musical persona still reaping tasty, edible fruit… victoriously.