Evangelion

Behemoth is a band I know little about. In fact, before this, I hadn’t heard more than a few songs, which were good, but not good enough to hook me into any albums before now. Call it one of those situations where there’s just too much music out there to hear everything. Keep that in mind as I bite deep into the throes of their newest release entitled Evangelion.

So, really, why are these guys popular? Because they fucking kick ass, that’s why! There’s nothing here but a solid forty minutes of riff-tastic, blasting, blasphemous Death Metal fun, executed with enough polish to stay relevant in the metal mainstream but not enough to weaken the excellent crunch on display. The songs are all of manageable lengths, Nergal’s vocals are energetically visceral and punishing, the guitars are heavy and malicious and the drums blast away like cannonballs at a fortress. Pretty much every track has some killer parts to it, with some great grooves and blasting and unholy riff assaults on the ears, and it’s so furious and intense that you might actually need to pause it for a second and take a breather!

Behemoth as a band have clearly got a good sense of songwriting here; epic, angry and tight as hell. They vary up their sound a fair bit, as on the especially groovy and commercial “Ov Fire and the Void,” which still manages to kick ass, and on songs like “The Seed ov I” and several others that have slow, doomy stomps to trade off with the blasting frenzy of the rest of it. The riffs are relatively simple and basic, but they’re done with enough aggression and power to remain thoroughly fun for most of this album’s duration. A couple songs like “Defiling Morality Ov Black God” aren’t as distinguished, but it’s not a big deal, as everything still generally sounds good.

At the end of the day, what the hell can you say about these pure-evil Polish bastards? They may not spell the word “of” like we do, but they do make some solid fucking music. Evangelion, packed as it is with songs as good as “Daimono,” “Shemhamforash” and the crawling, dirgey 8 minute monster “Lucifer,” is a good album that any Death Metal fan should be able to enjoy in 2009. Worthy.

Originally written for http://www.metalcrypt.com