Satan in the Death Row

This Brazilian black metal band is certainly first wave in sound, but the execution comes from a modern mind. The base ingredients of their sound would have anyone salivating - Manilla Road, Celtic Frost, Sarcofago, Destruction, Rotting Christ, Bathory, Helstar, Morbid Angel, Samael, and even Dissection at moments.

They play with a bombast and refinement of musicianship that lets the disparate influences of early black metal practitioners link together in such a way it's almost as if it's telling a story of how the past would eventually become the present. These songs are not too complex, mostly built around a main riff that serves as a branching and return point for its detours, but are executed well enough that their union of assorted schools of death, black, doom, traditional, thrash, and so on remains its coherency rather than falling into "avant-garde" stylistic ADD.

Backing up the highly varied riffing is bass work that is prominent yet prefers to underscore, harmonizing when appropriate in a manner similar to classic Iron Maiden. The drum programming, thankfully sounding rather punchy and more organic than most, plays less so for technicality and more for crushing heaviness, with crashing rolls and pounding militaristic rhythms, helping to lend the album a feel of an unstoppable army marching forth. Vocals are a little low in the mix, being a lurking rasp that narrates the onslaught from afar.

This is the first wave-styled black metal album we've all been waiting for, primal and molten yet free of the amateurism of most of their contemporaries.