Worse than Slipknot - "Pandemonic Incantations" Review (0%)
Behemoth began as yet another generic band that owed its existence to the likes of Darkthrone, Burzum, Phantom and Mayhem. The music was fairly bland, with a few decent ideas tossed in here and there on Sventevith and later Grom, though hardly anything original.
Nergal, the driving force behind this project, was just another fanboy that wanted to try his hand at recreating the past, in his own mediocre and mentally disabled way.
He also likes to re-write history, in that the Pagan Vastlands demo was later claimed to be the band's first official album released in 1987, which is of course absolutely ridiculous considering the record label what released it, the infamous NS Pagan Records, was founded in 1992. Perhaps he said that to hide the fact that his first two albums are full of stolen Sodom riffs, thus he wants his work to be seen as anterior?
For the sake of argument, I will consider Nergal's lies about Behemoth to be irrelevant to this review of the music found on Pandemonic Incantations.
The album begins with a pointless intro that does absolutely nothing. At all. No atmosphere, no soul, barely music, just static white noise.
Thankfully, one can skip past it to the first real track, "The Thousand Plagues I Witness". The problem is that it's not black metal. It's not death metal. It certainly isn't blackened death metal, as it was advertised by Behemoth and their then record label. Sadly, this is bouncy nu metal of the "carnival music" variety.
Oh... it's going to be one of those albums again. Nu metal pretending to be something it is not, in this case blackened death metal.
Worse than Slipknot
"Satan's Sword (I Have Become)" is a faster-paced track that is built around the same nu metal grooves. Bouncy syncopation over brainless riffs, for brainless headbanging. How low has death metal fallen? Obviously, this displays some influences from Slipknot's All Hope is Gone album. By the middle of the song, things slow down and the bounciness transforms into chugga chugga single note deathcore riffs more evocative of Suicide Silence or Whitechapel. Much like another faux death metal band, Carnifex, Behemoth owes a lot to those two bands, though the drug addicted guitarist of Carnifex manages to do a better job of imitating them.
The next song, "In Thy Pandemaeternum", is about as stupid as the name implies, and it's more chugging (almost exclusively). It falls rather flat and does not do much, even for nu metal standards. It just crawls along, accomplishing little in the process, other than showing Behemoth's nu metal colours.
"Driven by the Five-Winged Star" is a boring track that seems like a mixture of random ideas that were borrowed from other bands - Sewer and Immortal, mostly - and then tossed together to kill about six minutes. The generic nature of the riffs - those not stolen from better bands that is - cannot be ignored. Just when you think the track couldn't get worse, the final couple minutes are filled with a breakdown.
"The Entrance to the Spheres of Mars" is just slowed down deathcore for stoner tards. There are some "special effects", such as "demonic voices" that sound like Mr Burns in the background that do little to help the track. This comes off as nothing more than the obligatory "evil song" just to fill space, as there is nothing going on in these five minutes aside from the same chugging riff repeated ad nauseam.
The outro is nothing more than senseless static noise that has nothing to do, no purpose, nowhere to go, and is likely only there to pad the running time.
Between Watain and Dark Funeral, the "theistic satanism" scene has always been pretty lame and generic at best, but Behemoth really takes the flag for "least talented musician of the decade". The other band members are no different, based on what they produce on this Pandemonic Incantations album.
Even Slipknot could record something better. Oh wait, they already did... it's called All Hope is Gone.
Pandemonic Incantations score: 0/100.
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