Belarus' VERWÜSTUNG waste no time and begin pummeling faces straight away. "The Ashen Communion" doesn't care if you're ready. It just launches off at a quickened pace and expects you to catch up with it. The rule book isn't being rewritten here. Nothing on this record will astound you or have you locked within an all-consuming passion for this band. You will however, have one hell of a good time with this record. Simple? Yes. Stupid? Yes. Fun? Yes. Unusually for a band so concerned with such a quickened pace, "The Ashen Communion" lasts six minutes, which is truly the songs downfall. While the riffs contained with in are fast, furious and frantic, possibly more of them are needed. Things quickly become tiresome, and when these moments are lingered upon, cracks begin to show. When these riffs blast past you at top speed, the finer details are blurred. It's as if a car drives past you on the street. If it zooms past, you only see the silhouette. The general form. Not the details. Whereas, when the riffs repeat for too long, the car has stopped revealing scratches on paintwork you once thought pristine.

To extend this car metaphor to ridiculousness, there is one element of this record that, upon a vehicle would the equivalent of truck nuts: That snare drum. While it is indeed true that a good song will always sound good, the snare on this record is truly abysmal. This is not helped at all by the use of blast beats occasionally, because it starts to sound as if someone has thrown a trashcan down a flight of stairs. Think the snare drum on METALLICA's 'St Anger'. Yeah, that bad... Thankfully, the grooving riff work and real sense of fun, mean that, whilst this snare sound is off-putting, it can be ignored slightly. This sense of fun is incredibly present on the track "Hellfire Rock 'N' Roll." Death metal grooves give way to Blackened fury, only to stick a middle finger up to metal convention by working in a rock song. Traditional Blackened vocals with groovy, southern rock really shouldn't work, but it has this tongue-in-cheek quality to it, that never fails to bring a smile to my face. If anything, I wish they leaned into this Rock edge more! It's unique, whilst also being great in itself, even when you ignore the comedy aspect of things.

When VERWÜSTUNG take themselves seriously, they just don't have the same impact. This lack of impact, due to a sense of seriousness, always seems to rear its head whenever VERWÜSTUNG focus upon their Black Metal heritage. Songs like "The Ultimate Leveller" are just left feeling like Black Metal-lite. Stereotypical tremolo picked patterns, with stereotypical blackened vocals and stereotypical blast beats. VERWÜSTUNG are a good Blackened Thrash/Death band, but an extremely average Black Metal band. This is even proven in the same song when, a groove heavy, Death Metal riff at roughly 1:55. Will VERWÜSTUNG change the world? No. They will however, give you a good time, and surely that's good enough? Not every album needs to change the world, and reinvent the wheel. No one will argue that "A Clockwork Orange" isn't better than "Iron Man," but sometimes you just need something fun, and easily consumable.