Satanic Royalty

Sometimes, an album just deserves to be shouted about from the rooftops in your sickest voice. Satanic Royalty qualifies as one such album and here’s how I know. A few nights ago, I was brushing my teeth at nearly 1am and screaming the lyrics to ‘Lust Filth and Sleaze’ (not even a comma, that’s attitude) at the mirror, never mind that all my neighbours were asleep and it was freezing cold. And that was one beer into a nihilistic one-beer drinking spree. If you need me to spell out why that’s awesome, you had probably better not read the rest of the review, because you’re not going to like Midnight.

I’ll be the first to admit that Athenar (the one man of Midnight) doesn’t quite fuck me up like I wish he would, though there’s enough to get excited about to make sure that I’m about 83% fucked up, which is enough for most nights at 1am, especially if the next day is a work day. If you weren’t sure about how to become satanic royalty, you should follow these instructions: get a big, dirty cauldron and start filling it with as much Motorhead and Venom as possible, cramming it down with a rod of blackened metal composed of Abigail and Toxic Holocaust until it oozes over the rim and makes your living room smell all satanic too. There’s not really much more to the magic than that, except adding sex and blasphemy to taste, while it’s worth remembering that the faster you consume it the more you’re going to feel the effects.

If you don’t know me that well, that last comment is supposed to show that I really go fucking batshit crazy about the speed metal numbers among the 30 minutes on show, though I’m not quite so sure about the numbers that try to be nasty through slow pace or show more of a classic edge. No offense to Lemmy, but Motorhead were always better when they cut the brake cable and just riffed off into a smoking pile of rubble, as happens very dramatically on ‘Violence on Violence’, ‘You Can’t Stop Steel’, and the raging hard-on of ‘Lust Filth and Sleaze’. Those songs juxtapose the caustic chaos of Athenar’s punk/black vocals with sudden recurring dashes of speed, mostly unleashed after the hook of a chorus, so that the rush hits you just as you’ve emptied your lungs and leaves you gasping from the incision, because those riffs are fucking sharp. There’s plenty of screaming from the lead guitars too, which do a fine job of whipping the pace up even more.

For the steadier cuts, there is slightly more of a crushing quality to the guitars, backed up by the gut-punch of the bass, which also makes the quick sections feel suitably heavy. ‘Black Damnation’ is the only song that deliberately trades a quotient of its heavy metal for atmosphere, creeping around to give you the chills instead of spitting in your mouth. Along with ‘Rip This Hell’, this has the most classic bent to it, adding in chord-based fills that wouldn’t feel out of place on an early ‘80s album of loose underground metal. It’s slightly a shame that the rest of the material can’t make itself more hard-hitting, especially since the lyrics are pretty grim in places, though I suppose that we’re not supposed to take Satanic Royalty seriously enough to induce total destruction. On the other hand, ‘Holocaustic Deafening’ shoves bass volume to its maximum for a punkier thrasher, while the title track is the kind of filthy classic metal hymn that could well have been buried for 35 years.

As dirty, punky, blackened metal goes, there’s a lot of it that just reeks of style over substance, but Midnight proves that Athenar also has the chops to pull this off with maximum effect, though (let’s be honest) if Venom were given a pass, most people would be. Naturally, I would put a few more truly fast songs on the wish list if I knew Satan was listening, though I must say that a good job is done with rollicking mid-pace to ensure that nothing is actually boring, even if some of the songs don’t make me want to headbutt the fridge. Then again, with an album that’s over so quickly, there’s really no room for downtime. Certainly not at 1am.