Illegal Foreign Object

I have been on both sides of a band changing its sound and the resulting increase in attention and fandom. After “Enter Sandman” hit, Metallica no longer felt like my band. It’s a silly idea, of course, but one with which I’m familiar.

Polish black metal turned death metal turned blackened death metal (see how quickly labels get silly?) band Behemoth dealt with similar issues (albeit on a much smaller scale) in 2014 with the release of its tenth studio album, The Satanist.

Full disclosure: I had never heard of Behemoth before The Satanist. My introduction to its beautiful, pitch-black assault was thanks to the video for the song “Blow Your Trumpets, Gabriel”. It’s a terrifyingly stunning song — an almost gleeful crawl through Hell. I never would have thought I could find beauty in a lyric like, “I saw the Virgin’s cunt spawning forth the snake,” but here we are.

Those who “discovered” the band first will surely bristle at that previous description, but I cannot possibly give a shit. The point of these reviews is to turn people on to albums they haven’t heard, not echo the feelings of those already in the know. Besides, Behemoth currently consists of band members who go by Nergal, Inferno, and Orion, so maybe we shouldn’t take the shit so seriously, yeah?

Speaking of Nergal, Adam “Nergal” Darski, the lone remaining original member, went through his own personal Hell before The Satanist saw the light of day. In late 2010, Nergal was diagnosed with leukemia. Initially, doctors believed the cancer was too advanced for chemotherapy — that proved false. Nergal’s fame quickly netted him a bone marrow donor, and he began treatment three weeks after his diagnosis. After receiving the transplant, Nergal developed an infection that increased the possibility that his body would reject the transplant, requiring a lengthy stay in the hospital until March 2011. There’s no way such an ordeal didn’t inform The Satanist.

The first thing I’m taken by on The Satanist is the production. One cannot gloss over the job Daniel Bergstrand and the Wiesławski Brothers (Wojciech and Sławomir) did on this album. A doff of the cap is also due Matt Hyde (Slayer’s God Hates Us All and Deftones’ Gore) and Ted Jensen (Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me and Alice In Chains’ The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here). Their work mixing and mastering The Satanist gives the album a crispness and clarity often missing in such extreme music.

As a self-professed death metal (or black metal, whatever, honestly) novice, I cannot begin to wax poetically on the technical mastery of the music. What I can do, however, is tell you how The Satanist makes me feel, and it makes me feel, umm, relaxed.

When immersing myself in an album so intent on polarization, relaxation isn’t the vibe I expect to overtake me. It did, and I bathed in it like Telemachus in Nestor’s palace tub. “In the Absence Ov Light” is a journey through audio textures – death metal bludgeonings, spoken word passages, acoustic guitar, and even a mournful saxophone (followed by even more death metal bludgeonings). It’s a stunning display of song crafting that I feel is largely absent from the subgenre.

“O Father O Satan O Sun!” grooves, quakes, and explodes in all the right places. It might be sacrilegious to say, but it’s almost radio-friendly. *shudder, tremble, and shake!*

Many longtime, shortsighted fans surely craned a collective neck when Nergal said he hoped listeners could see beyond all the anti-Christian chest-poking because The Satanist is far more than yet another metal album hellbent on shocking people with deviltry and spooky imagery. For example, it is too simplistic to chalk the title track up as a song about Satanism. Nergal’s message to the listener goes well beyond such a myopic concept. Instead of getting caught up in the traditional idea of Satanism, the band wants the listener to look deeper, ask tougher questions, and challenge the status quo. Behemoth is big on thumbing its collective nose at societal expectations. The same goes for “Blow Your Trumpets, Gabriel”. Religious overtones aside, the song welcomes the collapse of all power, not just the iron grip of the church. Unsurprising, especially considering that in 2010, the Polish government brought blasphemy charges against Nergal after he tore apart a Bible on stage and called it “a book of lies”.

I have my own personal beliefs. Some intersect with Nergal’s (and some don’t). Still, I don’t feel one way or another about what he believes because I’m sure he’d be a damned fine morning coffee conversationalist (and that’s what really matters).

With The Satanist, Behemoth perfectly straddled the line between extreme music and accessibility. The album is a standalone piece of brilliant art in a genre of music traditionally light on nuance and often ham-fistedly unwieldy. Its uniqueness of sound and texture is refreshing, even comforting. The Satanist is a masterpiece.

Tracklist:

1. Blow Your Horns, Gabriel 10/10
2. Furor Divinus 9/10
3. Messe Noire 9/10
4. Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer 8/10
5. Amen 9/10
6. The Satanist 10/10
7. Ben Sahar 9/10
8. In The Absence Ov Light 10/10
9. O Father O Satan O Light! 10/10

Grade: 93