Sometimes you go for a walk in the forest of Heavy Metal and you find yourself in some weird new section. It's no longer the fun stampede through the realm of plain meat-headed joy. Killer riffs and solos make way for jazzy interludes and soft instrumentals. Technology has led to a plethora of electronic twinkling and laser noises fed by keyboards into otherwise battle-worthy Metal onslaughts. It can be a great enhancement but sometimes all the fancy bells and whistles aren't necessary even if it's a Folk Metal band that specifically uses bells and whistles. It can be a bit too much fluff and sometimes you just need a hearty helping of classic brain-eating carnage. Upon inspecting the album artwork of "Contempt, War And Damnation" by SLAUGHTBBATH I had high hopes for some neck-wrecking Metal. We see what may just be an interpretation of death; a grisly winged horseman riding atop an infernal steed. They trample the bones of countless dead while a banner held high proclaims this to be the declaration of war by SLAUGHTBBATH. A Chilean band putting out this monstrous collection to foreshadow their North American crusade, I mean tour.

SLAUGHTBBATH immediately charges forward like a savage beast going straight for the throat. "Astral Rape" opens up with a salvo of no-nonsense Black Metal devastation and the entire album doesn't let up until the last grim note is unleashed from the depths. (I can only assume that astral rape is when a black hole sucks you off against your will?) Each track on this collection is a clinic on intensity. The only song that takes a slight break for some samples is "The Sands Of Despair" (Not to be confused with the Sands of Mild Anxiety), but even that track is an absolute shotgun blast of heaviness in between. This is straight forward berserker charge battle tunes. It's the fast raging riffs, the intense blasts, the demonic blasphemous shrieks we've come to associate with the Gods' Rock'n'Roll. Every strum of that fuzzy bone-breaking bass is a defiant reminder that corpse paint and spikes aren't going anywhere.

This album is LOUD. I had to turn it down a bit to fully enjoy it which may just be a sign of what a square I am in my feeble old age. However it felt like some of the background grit was muted and at high levels those booming bass drums overpowered everything else. This is raw, gruesome, being-hacked-at-by-a-rusty-screwdriver style Black Metal. You'll be reminded of the classics with the fancy black and white album covers.

Standouts on this one for me were "Inverted Hierophany" which features some slower meatier head-banging parts between the intensity of raging blasts and shredding. The last song on the album is also a killer; "Black Revelation Of Death" is a thrashing carpet bombing of audio devastation. This is the unstoppable colossus that crushes the weak and ill-prepared. This is one of those albums that separate the true fans of extreme metal from the soft-lobed, mewling, pack-lambs.

If you like this stuff you will dig on the reviewed track... here we go: NUNSLAUGHTER, SARCAFAGO, CRAFT, HORNED ALMIGHTY, SARGOTH, BESTIAL MOCKERY, CORPUS CHRISTII and possibly even REPULSION. It's grimy, ugly, heavy, and angry. It's most teenagers apparently but it's also this release.