The Apotheosis

I remember seeing this lot on stage around the time this album was released. I also remember thinking to myself that they sounded a lot like Nile. After that I got to see the cover of their debut and it used the same color scheme as Nile's "In Their Darkened Shrines". Well, that's no coincidence anymore, now is it!

And yes, listening to this album you'd have to be a deaf man not to hear the Nile influences emanating out of the speakers. Shit, in "The Malleus Maleficarum Manuscript" you can even hear samples of Middle-Eastern singing underneath the music. The same goes for the riffing as well as the vocals throughout the whole album, it's Nile, again and again. It would be so easy to deride their lack of originality till the cows come home, plop a 40% score on it and be done with this. To be honest, I'd love to, just for the fact that the band is pretty infamous for their arrogant loudmouth interviews. That'll teach 'em, dammit!

That would indeed be easy, but I'm going to have to come clean here. I quite enjoy this album to be honest. It's actually the only one in their discography that I like, by the way. If you put aside the obvious Nile worship/plagiarism, you actually have a more than decent brutal death metal release. The guitars sound heavy as fuck, the playing is tight and it all oozes copious amounts of unrelenting aggression. Their music is delivered with precision and it is clear that these men have a lot of experience behind them. What they also have contrary to Nile is that they aren't as sample-heavy and their lyrical themes deal with war. In other words, it's a very good brutal death metal album, albeit not a very original one.

Let me put it like this: if you think "Black Seeds of Vengeance" has too much mummies and not enough tanks, dig right in. And speaking for myself, I couldn't care less about originality in death metal. That usually sucks anyway.