The Satanist

Behemoth get a lot of praise, but I find this to be a highly dull, over-cooked work without any soul. Every second of this thing is full of blasting riffs, technical and relentless drumming and shout-growl vocals that are at the forefront of all of it like a mainstream rock album, despite the album’s obviously “cult” type of aesthetic – it really is a quite clear, accessible production for this type of music.

Every second is just full of noise and it gets tiresome after a while. They can get a good mechanical groove going, but that’s basically all they do on here and it gets monotonous. There’s never any moments where the music gets to really breathe, no riffs I could describe as particularly hooky or even compelling in a broad sense. The mood is “evil” in the sense that the band wants you to be impressed with how much they like Satan and also how much time they spent at the library, but it’s a calculated, forced evil, focus grouped based on tropes dating back generations. I mean it’s not the 80s where pearl-clutching church groups are your enemy anymore; we all “get it” by now. It’s technical ‘wow, check that part out’ music for people into that, but you can find stuff that’s more extreme, more technical or both if you spend a few minutes on the internet really, so this doesn’t end up being tremendously exceptional in our current age.

All of it is very clean, very precise. It lacks the kind of spontaneity and savagery that I’d like from rebellious kinds of music. Personally I find the ideas here banal and conservative, but I can't bash this solely based on my own personal taste without taking into account what it is. The songs are well-constructed and I don’t get the idea that the band made any mistake with what they did here. I’m sure if I had the will, I could go through all of this and pick out various instrumental moments of proficiency, some intriguing stylistic touches, and all of that; but really this whole thing is like a math test – it strikes with a purpose, but man, am I bored and would rather go home and do anything else.