Sacrilegious Impalement – Cultus Nex Review

Originally written by Erik Thomas

I vaguely remember receiving this Finnish black metal act’s self-titled demo a couple of years ago, but I never got around to reviewing it, in part put off by the generic black-and-white scrawny, corpse-painted and spike-clad dude with a garden implement, howling at the moon on the cover.

So here is their full-length debut, and my reservations about the demo are pretty accurate. Despite being comprised of numerous members of several other obscure Finnish black metal acts like Uncreation’s Dawn, Urn, Goatsodomy, Sacrificial Dagger, Crosswrecker, Satanic Torment and Evil Angel, Sacrilegious Impalement plays out exactly like you’d expect them to: competent but rather unimaginative, generic Scandinavian-sounding old school tremolo-picked black metal.

The scathing but slightly melodic, cleanly produced tones are rooted in the likes of Marduk, Watain, Setherial, Dissection, Dark Funeral and such, with nothing that you have not heard before. It lacks any truly nasty or tangibly evil, visceral hues like country-mates Horna, and plays it surprisingly safe even with titles like “Total Annihilation”, “Holy Terror” and “Utterly Rotten”.  The material alternates between the traditionally frosty, tremolo-picked blasts and gallops (“Baptism by Blood”, “Revelations…The Coming”) and mid-paced warlike marches (as heard on “Arrival of the Forgotten Demons” and the imaginatively titled “March of Doom”). Even with vocalist Hellwind Inferion delivering a nice, varied performance that delves into gruffer death metal tones frequently, this 8-song, 37-minute foray is little more than competently rendered and played, standard black metal, sticking rigidly to the expected paradigm.

I wish I had more to say, but to be quite honest, this is the Chinese food of black metal: I have no problem with it while I’m listening to it, but as soon as I’m done with the record, I’m hungry for something more satisfying. But if you absolutely need some by-the-book pure black metal to balance out the more introspective and friendly injections the genre has succumbed to, you could do worse than this.

Posted by Old Guard

The retired elite of LastRites/MetalReview.

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