Originally written by Ramar Pittance.
There’s a seductive bit of reasoning re: the contradictions inherent in satanic metal and if you spend enough time around metal forums you know it cold. It goes like this: “By acknowledging the existence of Satan, we’re buying into a binary system in which God has to exist. Metal music should be irreligious, and satanic metal should be ignored.” That’s a nearly airtight argument and yet it withers when confronted with Deicide’s inexorably blasphemous sophomore release, Legion–an album that willed Hell into existence and promised an eternity there for a generation of listeners.
Legion is less an album about worshiping Satan than it is about gleefully embracing the prospects of eternal damnation. Built on a foundation of the Hoffman brother’s insistent and dexterous chromatic riffing, Legion‘s songs present a series of swells and false crescendos that render the listener completely adrift. It’s an album full of lies, tricks and broken hopes. Take a listen to the surge of intensity at 2:10 of “Satan Spawn, The Caco Daemon,” where the band swaps a refrain in favor of what proves to the some of the fastest playing on the album (or anywhere else, at the time).
This may just be the case of a young band pushing the envelope, but to me this sort of salt for salve exchange feels calculated. Legion is an album at odds with everything: the strictures of Catholicism, the good-times of thrash metal and the expectations of listeners who have the temerity to even suggest that Deicide should stop hurting them.
But despite that the fact that Legion remains a boundary pushing and legitimately frightening album nearly 20 years after it’s release, that’s not the reason it’s included on this list of essential Halloween listens. It’s included here because, in this history of metal, nobody has ever tricked us like Deicide front man Glen Benton. The man who promised to kill himself at 33 in a final act of blasphemous defiance is probably right now more worried about scaring off his daughters’ potential suitors. Eric Hoffman, in an infamous anti-Benton screed posted in January of 2005, asserted “[Benton] was married in a church. It is all a show.”
To that I say, who cares? While Benton contributed little musically to Deicide’s finest album, he was the architect of their enduring image–their costume. There’s no shame in that. Benton may have been peddling an act, but his aims were pure–to confront, punish and, ultimately, scare the shit out of you. Here’s to the man that made a career of an escape that most of us only enjoy once a year.
