Well, here’s a sentence one doesn’t imagine has been written before: Aeons of Satan’s Reign is a love letter.
Lower that skeptical eyebrow back to resting position, friends, because in all honesty, that’s exactly what the second full-length album from Satan’s Wrath sounds like: a loving encapsulation of everything that the players have found thrilling and vital and–yes–even fun about heavy metal throughout the course of their devotion to it. If their specific articulation of that love doesn’t resonate with you, more’s the pity, but at least we can agree that the motivating factor is pretty admirable.
Aeons of Satan’s Reign exults in muscular Celtic Frost worship that stomps and gallops and even gets a bit nimble, and all along the way tips its cap to Bathory, Iron Maiden, Slayer, and heaping, blood-soaked boatloads of Mercyful Fate. And, just in case you were uncertain of the band’s inspirational lineage, not just one but two songs feature the phrase “necromantical screams” peppered in the lyrics.
Satan’s Wrath throws in a few liturgical touches here and there – organs, choirs, acoustic guitars, and the like – but the raison d’être of Aeons of Satan’s Reign is to make bloody, occult blasphemy into a great big grinning rock and roll party. To that end, each of these eight songs is built on a sturdy base of classically flavored riffing that calls to mind everything from Don’t Break the Oath to Welcome to Hell to Epicus Doomicus Metallicus, but never devolves into outright theft. And along the way, the album is littered with all sorts of great little touches: the bright, up-front ride cymbal clanging on the outro of “Archfiend”; the very Fate-ful way that “Lives of the Necromancers” pounces out of the starting blocks; the classic, half-time thrash fade-out on “Ecstasies of Sorcery”; or the none-more-solos guitar heroics of “Die White Witch Die.”
The only major weak spot of the whole blend is frontman (and former Electric Wizard bassist) Tas Danazoglou’s vocal performance, which is suitably gruff and very nicely articulated, but suffers from being completely one-dimensional and pushed too far to the front of the mix. His tone itself occasionally recalls both Tom Warrior and Root’s Big Boss, but a wholly flattened-out version of either iconic frontman. Comparing the vocal performance to last year’s debut album Galloping Blasphemy (on which Danazoglou also played bass and drums, though here he just sticks to vocals), it seems clear that the fault lies mostly with how the vocals are mixed, but something about his delivery on this album leans more often toward a grumble than a snarl.
Nevertheless, Aeons of Satan’s Reign is a complete blast. The album brings exactly zero innovations to the table of heavy metal, but that’s no reason to refuse them their seat. While an album such as this should be an exercise in utter redundancy, the tactile joy of the players is apparent, springing off their instruments like sparks in a molten forge. That alone should be enough to make you a co-signee on their love letter to our shared heritage.
