Review Summary: Pros: RIFFS! Cons: Cheese.
One of the best things about Cleveland-based death metal stalwarts Nunslaughter is they’ve never taken themselves too seriously. Over the course of the band’s nearly 40 year career, the sole remaining original member and vocalist Don of the Dead has guided the blasphemous outfit from one album (and many, many splits and EPs) to the next in an eternal and often quite humorous battle against Christian sanctimony.
That’s why it’s no surprise that the band’s latest album,
Satanic Chaos Legions doesn’t break from or improve on that decades-long trajectory. It’s roughly the same maniacal blend of death, thrash and crust that’s propelled them thus far, but with the lyrical cheese dialed up a little too much.
The highlight here, however, is that
Satanic Chaos Legions consistently serves up the fist-pumping moment. While this album feels more polished and less gloriously unhinged than older albums like the truly nasty
Goat, practically every second of the album’s snappy 34-minute runtime is stuffed with riffs. The songs move effortlessly from Slayer-esque thrash to furious death metal passages to grindy crust – all of which are imbued with loads of tongue-in-cheek blasphemy. The band also knows when to switch up the tempo and deliver some mean halftime cuts like “Peukharist” or “Heavenless” along with vicious assaults like “Christian Ruse” and “Die Your Own Death.”
Don of the Dead keeps the one-liners coming throughout the album mostly by way of a raspy mid-range growl. My favorite is “Live your own life, for you will die your own death.” Hell yeah. But sometimes the over-the-top lyrics can get a bit too goofy, to the detriment of the album overall. While they make for a much more entertaining listen knowing the band is in on the joke than slogging through, say, a certain self-serious recent Behemoth record, the lyrics can sometimes also pull me out of the moment. On repeated listens they actually dragged my overall rating down a bit. Just check out this passage to see what I mean: "I made a pact with the Devil's dog, to bring me back, I *** on god."
After almost four decades of swinging their farce-cored death metal baseball bat again and again into the gristled face of unwarranted Christian piety, there’s not a ton to mull over in this review.
Satanic Chaos Legions finds Nunslaughter more or less doing what they’ve always done. It’s largely a good time full of killer riffs that’ll get your pulse up at the expense of incorporating new ideas and enduring too many overly-corny lyrics. But if you’ve already dived into Nunslaughter’s impressively expansive discography, you didn’t really need this review to tell you that. If you like metal and having fun, check your ambitions at the door and give this a spin.
