Fear, Suffering & Death!

Servi Diaboli was formed in 2011 by Armando Luiz which, despite a few miscellaneous musicians sticking their heads into the mix every once a while, serves a solo vessel for Luiz to ponder themes of vampirism, misanthropy and occultism via black metal. Luiz is a Brazilian born musician, who relocated to Spain, where he formed Servi Diaboli, and then moved to Norway, taking the project with him. Despite never really remaining settled in one place for very long, Servi Diaboli managed to put together a debut full length album, Fear Suffering & Death!, which was released independently in April of 2014 as a digital download. UK based label Cold Raw Records picked up the album and re-released it on CD in a limited run of sixty-six copies.

Fear, Suffering & Death! features nine tracks of black metal with a slightly strange twist. The majority of the album features rangy trem picking with a rather warm tone, blasting programmed drums and snarled, raspy and exceedingly strained vocals, but the kicker is the injection of strange keyboard lines that sound like midi patches from the mid-nineties. Really, it makes for a rather disjointed and jarring listen, even it things do sync up wonderfully at times. All through the album there are brief flashes of brilliance surrounded befuddled pacing and synths for the sake of having synths because, you know, synths. Even the mid-paced tracks, like “Devil's Sons” and “Sub nocte per umbram” overuse the midi flavored keys, rather than giving the rest of the instruments a chance to shine.

When things are sounding good, like on the first portion of “Satan's Church” or most of “House of Death”, everything seems to mesh together in a chaotic spree of fast paced, trem-laden black metal. The closing track, “Ritual” focuses on these faster riffs, with some rather inventive patterns and a strong underlying melody while the drums blast away with no abandon, but the cold and rather sinister feeling of the song is utterly killed when the music slows down and makes way for a cheese-filled synth section. It's rather disappointing, but there is enough in the way of the solid moments to latch onto even if the midi styled keyboards really take away from the overall presentation.

Armando Luiz has some really good ideas on Fear, Suffering & Death!, but there could be a lot of what-the-fuckery cut out of the mix, as well. With a different keyboard patch, things could have gone a lot smoother, as it comes across somewhat cheap and dated. Servi Diaboli certainly seems to be on to something here, so wait and see if his move to Norway yields a more positive outcome.

Written for The Metal Observer.