In the Final of the Life

The central-south American black metal scene has been on a fucking rampage throughout the last two decades, with bands coming from obscure countries such as Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Costa Rica and other unusual countries for metal. Most of these countries are impoverished and are filled with discord, panic, and murder. This is a perfect platform for the creation of putrid black metal fucking metal. Unlike their European counterparts, these guys in these countries do not have the money to record in large studios and do not have the same freedom of expressions we Europeans and North Americans do. In the late 1980s and early 90s, the Norwegians and the Swedes were screaming about darkness, hatred, and solitude while living in beautiful and economically strong countries. The guys from Imperious Satan, in my opinion, have more and much better reasons to play this putrid type of raw black metal than their counterparts from richer countries do.

Do not expect any innovation from this extended-play. This effort contains two songs, the first one spans around eight minutes long, and the last song serves as sort of an outro and lasts only a couple of minutes. The songs presented on here are pure Darkthrone worship. The first song barely has any changes in riffs and relies on the droning effect of repetitive chord progressions. Those chord progressions are at times heavily distorted and will be ready to rape your ear, and are sometimes extremely clean in order to create an even more depressive atmosphere to the whole song. The vocals are pretty standard black metal screeching but they hold their own. Not once does the singer strain his vocals too much and makes way for petty singing mistakes like the majority of raw black metal singers do. Another very important aspect of this EP is the sound of the bass. The bass sounds fucking glorious, think, and simply crushing especially in the first half of the first song of the extended play. The drums sound is extremely organic and the guy behind the drums definitely knows what he's doing. He's able to flirt with tempo changes very conservatively and while adhering to slow and mid-paced tempos, his work remains very consistent and listenable.

As for the atmosphere, I felt that although the band aimed at creating a depressive overall atmosphere, I still felt like there is something missing. Maybe it's because of the extreme mudiness of the guitars which sometime fall prey to sound under-mixed, but those are small issues which were easy to deal with. The lyrics of this albums are written in terrible English, but that is to be expected when you're trying to read lyrics of bands from former Spanish or Portuguese colonies. As I've said, this band has the typical Darkthrone sound, and after you read the lyrics you will definitely notice that the mountains and the sadness Imperious Satan is referring to, allude to Darkthrone's seminal album "Transilvanian Hunger". The cover art is just a member of the band holding an upside down cross and wearing the over-the-top black metal look popularized by Gorgoroth, Mayhem, Mystifier, Blasphemy, Black Witchery and the likes..