Danish band PANZERCHRIST have been rolling over the bodies of the dead in their anti-christ driven tank for almost 30 years. Their 1996 debut album "Six Seconds to Kill" put them in the platoon with putrid peers such as VADER and BOLT THROWER, death metal infused with the festering evil of black metal, an exciting start to a long and storied career.  Like many stories, however,  PANZERCHRIST's is one with many chapters and many characters. An infantry of line-up changes behind them, and ten years since releasing their last record, the darkest of bands hailing from the northern shoulder of the European woods has just released their eighth full-length album "Last of a Kind."

It's a relentless barrage on the aural senses, and the band doesn't let up for the better part of an hour. Sonja Rosenlund Ahl's vocals are insanely evocative, relentlessly evil and dark.  The production gives the growls the necessary oomph without detracting from the organic nature of hearing actual vocal cords get shredded like bodies beneath the tracks of a 25-ton Panzer tank. Ahl , formerly of ARSENIC ADDICT, is an imposing presence: there seems to be a synergy of darkened energy between the band's compositions, Tue Madsen's production (of BEHEMOTH  and AT THE GATES fame) and her guttural, desperate screams from hell. Listened as one-piece "Last of a Kind" is an ominous look into the bowels of hell in all its manifestations.  The album is brilliantly tracked, and relentless in its abuse of the sonic world.  You see that Panzer ahead of you?  It's piloted by the fucking anti-christ and it's not going to change it's direction.  We're all sinners and doomed to rot in hell: PANZERCHRIST is here to make sure our bodies are flattened enough to fit through the blood-covered slots.

Any album that has a song as gloriously named as "Sabbath of the Rat," in my opinion, is going straight into the lump of album-of-the-year records automatically.  But it's not just the title itself that does the dirty trick.  When I used to walk to the subway in the wee hours of the morning in Brooklyn, occasionally a dog-sized rat would run right in front of me and furiously cross the street, before hugging the tenement facades into some sewer hole to hell. "Sabbath of the Rat" sounds like that, but instead of one rat, this is an army of fucking rats, conjured up by the queen herself.  "Disemboweled by festering teeth, whipping tails shredding entrails, seal the pact with intestinal filth," she screams. "A pleasing sacrifice for the rat king."  If Ahl is the rat-queen, fuck if I want to meet the rat-king, that's for sure.

"Sabbath of the Rat" is followed up by "Baptized in Piss," which is the most unapologetically blasphemous song you'll find on an album filled with the shit.  Oddly, the melodies on the song, while relentlessly pummeling with the tremolo picking and blast beats, is surprisingly hopeful.  PANZERCHRIST, as musicians, find ways in each song to create moods that weren't there before.  This can be a tall order for this kind of death influenced black metal (or is it blackened influenced death metal? Who the fuck cares, really.).  The band adds keyboards once in a while, but they are used sparingly enough that they don't get overwhelming or detract from the purity of the evil. Final song "Juniper Creek" ends the album in typical epic fashion, depicting a sacrifice to Satan in the dirty waters of Juniper Creek.  Danni Jelsgaard's drums rumble across the deadened surface of the Earth, and the dual guitars of Danny Bo Pedersen and Frederik O'Carroll create a sweeping vista of lost souls and bloodied, blackened bodies.  Founding member Michael Enevoldsen creates a blackened sonic foundation that's not so much heard as it is felt.  It's a fitting end to a confident, fist-clenched collection of blackened metal.

Considering the band's been away for the past ten years, and has undergone this litany of line-up changes in their three decades of existence, "Last of a Kind" is a brutally self-assured return to the top. If founding member Michael Enevoldsen has learned anything in his blackened past, it's how to put together an infantry of death metal soldiers.  The band sounds practiced- a well-oiled, single-visioned group of musicians who want to bring their evil message to a new generation of victims.  "Last of a Kind" shows the world just how heinous it actually is, and PANZERCHRIST has their guns pointed towards all of us.  Be prepared to get blown away.