Greece is a land of many delights, from the culinary arts all the way to the visual arts, but it's the music made there that I feel is where the country really holds its own. There's many genres to choose from, with bands like Stoner Rockers PUTA VOLCANO, extreme music heavyweights like ROTTING CHRIST and SEPTIC FLESH, and the speed metal meets blackened death thrash purveyors of today's focus, VICIOUS KNIGHTS.

The band's newest release is called "Alterations Through Possession," and it is thirty-five minutes of high speed Metal that has its icy fingers buried in the ferocity of Black Metal, the drive of Thrash Metal, and with all of the intensity needed to pull it off properly.

Initially I wasn't big on the vocals, but the music does a great job of making them seem better than what my first impressions had been. By the end of my time with this, I had come to like the vocals and the album, and I feel that fans of this style will be quite happy, as VICIOUS KNIGHTS is extremely adept at what they do.

Despite my mixed feelings about the genre, there are more than a few tracks that hit the spot for me, and we'll talk briefly about them now.

I found that really, I liked the opening track, "From Nothingness to a Slave of Darkness". This one opens up the album perfectly, delivering high velocity, high intensity blackened Speed-Thrash with all the power one would expect from the genre. By the end of this track I had also decided that the vocals were perfectly attuned to the music, and if they hadn't been performed in this style, then they wouldn't fit the music nearly as well.

"The Boneghoul King (Miserly)" is another one that is pretty awesome and has a few tricks that the first track wasn't employing. There's a few cool dynamic shifts, and there are more diverse riffs being thrown around as well. In my opinion, this should have been the album opener, but I can also see the logic in it being the second one too.

I love it when bands have a song named after the band, as it always makes me think of it as being their theme song in a way, and it needs to be indicative of said band's style; "Vicious Knights" does exactly that, and it's one of the highlights of this record. I mean, the smoking fast lead break is cause enough for that thought, with its speed and precision it really is what people think of when they read about the genre as a whole.

Other killer songs include "They Cast No Shadow" and "Swing from the Grave".

I can be a bit old school when it comes to thrash/speed metal, as I truly prefer the cleaner vocal approach that many newer bands have abandoned, including VICIOUS KNIGHTS, who have taken vocal cues from Black Metal, Death Metal, and even older bands like VENOM. Yet I still enjoy how they attack this style with power, speed, and an all-out attack that will have many of you breaking your necks in headbanging glory. This is definitely a cool sounding album that has helped me appreciate this genre all the more!