BLAZE OF PERDITION: "The Hierophant"

On matter of last year's Blaze of Perdition EP, The Burning Will of Expansion, I criticized the band for staying in too familiar and safe waters of Watain esque religious black metal, and now that I have given their sophomore full-length, The Hierophant, more than just a couple of spins, it becomes evident that my previous comments about Blaze of Perdition's unremarkableness apply to this record as well.

I guess that things are a bit better from an overall perspective this time around, but not much has changed. The band still revels in a very traditional orthodox black metal sound initiated by such names as Dissection, Watain and mid-era Deathspell Omega to some extent. The first few tracks, ”The Hierophant” and ”Back to the Womb” are quite tiresome feasts on fast tempos and evil dissonance that never rises over mediocrity, followed by the full-band interlude ”Let There Be Darkness” which is a tad more interesting approach compositionally as it runs for less than a minute and a half. ”Gospel of the Serpent's Kin” is the only proper highlight here with its sweet lead melodies in the latter half of the track, concluding in an acoustic arrangement of the same melody. The rest of the album, still four tracks to go, returns to the way too familiar paradigm of pedestrian orthodox black metal, the kind of stuff every other new black metal group seems to be putting out right now.

There's talent in this band and definitely no shortage of musical skills. The Hierophant is executed tightly and swiftly, and Necromorbus studio assures a firm production. Usually I tend to loathe what comes out of that studio, but this time the sound hasn't been overly polished; it's just about enough harsh and sharp yet far from low fidelity. The Hierophant is an enough pleasurable listen that, however, says pretty much nothing on the first rounds, but at least some of the riffs get better in time. There's too much predictableness in the music that hinders it from rising to better ratings, so that's quite a major glitch I hope the band will be working on on future recordings – unless they deliberately want to keep things at where they are. I personally see no point in that as right now the band is hard to discern from other similar acts – which in number are many. Please do give it a go if you're still up for another dive into regular religious black metal and do not expect heaps of innovation.

3 / 5