To Embrace the Corpses Bleeding

Inspired by a massacre of some 30,000 people by the so-called Dragon Prince ( I assume that's Vlad Dracul aka Vlad the Impaler) in Romania in 1460, this album happens to be the last full-length recording by Judas Iscariot. Perhaps knowing that it was going to be the act's last record, main man Akhenaton has made this a super-aggressive and hateful if a bit monotonous package. On this recording he is joined by drummer Cryptic Winter though to me, much of the drumming is so incredibly and consistently fast and manic that I find it hard to believe the skinbanger's efforts were not helped in some way by someone speeding up his parts in the studio or wherever they were recorded.

The first half of the album is mostly all fast straight-ahead minimal BM with Akhenaton's deep and leisurely-paced vocals brimming with venomous bile. "I Awoke to a Night of Pain and Carnage" is perhaps the most varied of the early pieces with a change of pace and rhythm; other songs tend to pass in a blur so it's easy to miss detail like chord and riff changes and you come away with the impression of music of extreme hate and hostility: this effect may well have been intended. The slight glitch near the start of "Where Eagles Cry and Vultures Laugh" could easily pass as a slight scratch on the disc and does not affect the track much at all.

Halfway through the album with "In the Valley of Death, I am their King", we start getting more melodic and distinctive music with a bit more atmosphere, depth and maybe some soulfulness, and Cryptic Winter finds himself with a bit more interesting stickwork to do. "Behold the Lamb of God Descending" follows Akhenaton's mid-paced singing fairly closely but during the instrumental breaks the pace zooms off into the territory where g-forces take effect so the track ends up going through a bewildering number of changes in speed. "Spectral Dance of the Macabre" is a real oddball piece, very close to sedate rock boogie in spite of its title and subject: of all the songs here, you'd expect this one to be a real whirlaway dervish. Then it's back to full-on crazed aggression and hatred with spurts of lead guitar wiggle on the outro piece "The Dead Burst Forth from Their Tombs".

For a swansong album, I wish this was longer with longer and slightly slower tracks especially in the first half, and a bit more keyboard ambience throughout as well. The early songs sound rather one-dimensional with each succeeding track seeming to go faster and faster, and all have much the same slightly blurred, sort of gloomy Central European / Carpathian Mountains forest atmosphere. Later songs show more variation in structure and execution, and suggest that if there'd been less emphasis on hatred, aggression and revenge, and maybe a bit given over to, say, sorrow or feeling the immensity of the massacre victims' suffering and need for justice, we could have had the basis for a really great album. As it is, this is not a bad recording but it's not one that enhances Judas Iscariot's reputation much.