Morbid Death's Sceptre

"Morbid Death's Sceptre" is a powerful album. Teitanfyre rush to attack from the first second and throughout the album they neither lose steam nor slow down the onslaught. Their music is not just fast black metal, but powerful and very dynamic black metal. And such a characteristic is not an empty phrase due to the rather high quality of the recording: even the rawness of the sound is upscale here, in a manner of speaking. There are all kinds of riffs on "Morbid Death's Sceptre", practically over the whole black metal scale: there are penetrating / heartfelt, there are simplistic but baleful, there are splitting as a vortex. Most riffs are memorable – there are no ones that simply fill the void.

Paradoxical as it may sound, the imperfection (that means this work could be perfect) of the album lies precisely in this variety of riffs. If "Morbid Death's Sceptre" sounds as the background for your activity, or you listen to it with half an ear, you can even enjoy this variety. Anyway, listening to this album is not boring in any parts of the songs. But if you start to break it down for yourself, then the lack of wholeness begins to catch your ear. This is just a mishmash of riffs and even styles / genres, which you need to adapt to in order to perceive it as euphony. You had scarcely got hooked on one riff, when the next begins to sound – but from a completely different (stylistic) sphere.

To make this thought clearer, it's enough to note that a lot of influences are recognized on "Morbid Death's Sceptre" – and so, Teitanfyre easily "overjump" from one influence to another, not really worrying about how these passages are consistent with each other. Sometimes this work even sounds like a potpourri of underground metal music. For the same reason, despite the fact that the album was recorded in 2010, "Morbid Death's Sceptre" leaves a feeling that it is nothing else but "greetings from the 90s." It's not bad at all, but...

Well, this may seem like a sweeping statement, so let's try to describe at least the beginning of each song. The very first song "With Cathedral Carrion" surprises with the Emperor's riff, which is copied almost one to one, fortunately (is it good to start the album with someone else's riff? especially someone famous's?), it doesn't last long, it's replaced by another one, definitely from the "orthodox" black metal territory, however, very soon a thrash metal riff outcompetes it. In the second "The Devil's Venom", you can hear early Dark Funeral, followed by the brutal black / death metal episode, you know, such a blastbeat attack on the edge of grindcore, and then Teitanfyre jump off it into heavy metal, well, almost heavy metal. The third "Mother Plague" begins with some punk-ish black metal, trivial tremendously, then follows a hasty guitar fingerpicking, and then again thrash metal. The sixth "Morbid Death's Scepter" begins as early death metal (very early), then black metal, then thrash metal – and so on.

No, this is not avant-garde black metal at all, where the canvas of the song is also constantly changing. A mishmash (whether it is ordered chaos or contrived one) is the essence in that genre, but for "Morbid Death's Sceptre" it is just a side effect. At least the fifth song "The Horns Sathanas" is designed in a monolithic style: the riffs are consistent, the track sounds complete, there is no sense of potpourri here, so it can be called the best song on the album. The seventh "Wreath of Worms" is created in more or less the same style too, while it is the most brutal on the album. So there are only two accomplished songs on this album. In addition, as mentioned above, there is not so much the truly original material on "Morbid Death's Sceptre". Yes, we are all under the influence of one or another band / genre, but why make helter-skelter out of this? That's the problem.

However, if we abstract our mind from all the influences and their interweaving (that's exactly how we listen to music, right?), we can convince ourselves that the album sounds quite original and distinctive. We all know that we can drink not only pure Jack Daniel's – there are a great many cocktails.