Belphegor - Blood Magick Necromance

Belphegor – Blood Magick Necromance

Scheduled Release Date: 14^th January 2011 on Nuclear Blast Records

When I read about this album coming out and I heard what the band had described their own material as, I thought that they were being a bit excessive in saying that this album would be the rebirth of blackened death metal as a genre. Boy was I wrong.

When the first song, In Blood – Devour This Sanctity, blasts off, you can tell this is Belphegor doing what Belphegor do best. Very eastern influenced guitar riffs coupled with a nice dark atmosphere and drumming that can flow very nicely from blast beats into simple slower beats with ease, and all of this show in this track. It all flows through very nicely and makes for a great song, aside from the ending which is good but doesnt really fit with the rest of the song. The next track Rise to Fall and Fall to Rise uses wonderful discordant riffing coupled with sections of powerful chugging all mixed in and moved nicely by once again well flowing drum beats, particularly with the rolling double bass under the slower guitar sections. A really dark evil song.

The title track is probably my favourite of the album. It begins nice and slow and dark then bursts into powerful drumming and great guitar riffing. The bass leads into the verse riff wonderfully and sounds fantastic but the highlight for me is the chorus section. The group vocals coupled with the evil atmosphere combine perfectly to give such an insane feel to the song and send shivers up my spine. When it fades into an eerie cleaner section I thought that would be the end of this track, but the chorus part belted in once more and it was like being hit by a train on its last time round, the way it burst in with even more insane sounding vocals and a somehow darker feel left me in absolute awe.

Discipline Through Punishment is the only track that I feel disappoints on this record. It starts off very well with an eerie clean guitar combined with powerfully dark distorted chords, but the section before the chorus has guitar riffs that wouldnt feel out of place on a generic deathcore album, which is very unlike Belphegor. Luckily the chorus is good enough to make me forget about that, but the ending is too sudden, as if they ran out of ideas for this song and leaves me thinking that they could’ve done better with that particular track. Angeli Mortis De Profundis on the other hand bursts straight in with an absolute onslaught of blast beats, fast riffs and mighty vocals that doesnt relent throughout. It may be the shortest track on this album by quite a bit, but that in no way stops it being one of the best.

The rest of the album carries on exactly how the first few songs started it, with Impaled Upon The Tongue Of Sathan being a very evil sounding song and certainly living up to it’s name, and Possessed Burning Eyes continuing the same flow of great riffs, interesting song structures and dark atmosphere. The closing track, Sado Messiah burst in with a fantastic opening riff and insane drum work and blasts straight through the entire of the song. The drumming somehow continuing throughout at the same pace and overall has that same fantasticly dark atmosphere to it that the rest of the album has had.

This review may seem a tad long as you’re reading it, but once you have listened to this album I think you will fully understand why. The blackened death metal genre hasnt felt this alive and fresh in a long time and Belphegor were fully justified in their statement. Bravo.

9.5/10

Bryan Shuttleworth