Crossing
between the dark realm of Black Metal and the ferocity of Thrash Metal,
Infernal Majesty bring a whole new album forward to front the charge of War
Metal, a term made popular by the band Destroyer 666, who play the same style,
but started much later and would be easily influenced by Infernal Majesty. “No God” is the
bands first full release since 2004’s highly praised album, “One Who Points to
Death” and it’s clear that age hasn’t slowed Infernal Majesty down one bit.
The
album kicks off with two very different songs, the aggressive and destructive
opening track “Enter the World of the Undead”, which is an absolutely
destructive piece of Thrash Metal with the more harsh and aggressive Black
Metal vocals. While vocalist, Chris Bailey, doesn’t take on a full fledged
Black Metal tone (see bands like Emperor, Mayhem, Marduk for example), he has
found the perfect blend of rasp and melody to match the terrifying force of the
instrumentals and bring forth one of the strongest examples of Black Thrash any
band could possibly offer. In contrast with the opening track though, the second
track, “In God You Trust”, takes a far more melodic approach almost reminiscent
of Cradle of Filth, without the ear piercing screams, of course. Most Metal fans
know what a Melodic Death Metal song sounds like, so I won’t spend too much
time explaining this song, the real thing I do want to cover is at the end of
the song, while I can’t articulate a sound, what I can say is how impressive
drummer Kiel Wilson’s ability is. The pattern the song follows at the end is
weird and unique, something I don’t think I’ve personally ever heard in a song
before and anyone who is a drummer, should definitely check this album out just
for Wilson’s ability alone.
Something
fans of Infernal Majesty might have missed is in 2016, the band dropped a couple
of singles, the title track, “No God”, and arguable an even more impressive song
“House of War”, which is a mid tempo, headbanging masterpiece and while the
other two songs really show off certain members, as does this one. The riffing,
the soloing, everything about this song from a guitar stand point is incredibly
awe-inspiring and Steve Terror and Kenny Hallman are probably incredibly happy
with how this song turned out, because man is it a killer piece of music.
Like with most Metal music, the bass is hidden underneath everything, keeping the
tempo and while there’s few songs you can really hear it, “Systematical
Extermination” is definitely the song where it’s most apparent, as there are
many places where it does take the forefront and show you the groove. This song
actually reminds me a lot of Megadeth personally, just the style of Thrash and the grace and groove of the bass, it’s a song I could picture "Rust In Piece" era Megadeth recording, but mastered and made better by Infernal Majesty.
While
there seems to be a lot of different sounds featured on this album, Infernal
Majesty are undoubtedly one of the absolute best Black Thrash bands out there
and “No God” simply helps solidify this fact. There’s no Metal fan that shouldn’t
check this album out, there’s easily something for everyone to get into
and I think the amount of different sounds you can hear on this album should
make it obvious just how much of a widespread influence Infernal Majesty’s
albums may have had on Metal as a whole. This album has been a long time coming, but I'm more than happy to say, the wait was well worth it.
100/100
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