Review Summary: Feeding the crawling shadows (at the Shake Shack)
The familiarity Sargeist have pedalled since
Satanic Black Devotion is a wicked weight to balance. I'll be the first to confess that I had always figured they'd be forever drawing from the well of thunderous, cathartic, ass-beating black metal that is ultimately a set of gradually waning iterations of
Let the Devil In. In this sense there will always be a most
vague yearning for something
slightly better, like eating Five Guys when you know you could be having Shake Shack. Yet still, it is a burger, succulent in its bath of grease and ultimately satisfying, just as is the catastrophic waves of hellfire pulsing riffs that
Flame Within Flame churns out, with a demonic cackling on par with the average Marlboro-induced speech tone of the line cook flipping the aforementioned grease patties. I'll take my burger blackened, Kyle.
If there was even
any distinguishable difference between this and previous records however, the vocals perhaps are the most immediately noticeable. The presence of massive barks has been toned down to some degree for more guttural cackles that are a touch more hypnotic amidst a constant fury of blasts and tremolos that, at points, almost seem to ebb and flow like some voracious tide. It would be terribly inaccurate to say this lends any sense of calm however, as while pleasantly silly (albeit assuredly to self-serious) in the manner most black metal bands can be, it instead funnels into the album's cryptic energy. This is, almost assuredly, the most ghostly the band has ever sounded, with a near omnipresent echo piercing through the misty veil of desolate riffs and cacophonous beating drums. Case in point being “The Chant of Rotting Tongues”, where the vocals practically
drip like bile from aging carrion while the riffs enact as an ephemeral waft that both amplify and contrast this otherwise guttural atmosphere.
Bearing these subtle changes in mind, the waves of catharsis that Sargeist holds a firm reign on are certainly not dismissed even if they don't quite hit the lofty heights of yore. “Ordained and Adorned” and “Rite of Ascension” are both thundering epics, with the latter (in its almost black metal take on Nile riffology near the end) feeling much as though one is trapped in an Egyptian catacomb, walls crumbling on nigh every side whilst the musty smell of dessication indicates a great and fretful necromantic awakening. In this sense the whole record crafts an energy of cryptic and chaotic that showcases that this bubbling cauldron of blackness will thankfully, never stop churning. Thank god (or uh, lucifer) for that.
