August 23, 2013 | , | 3.5

Sacrilegious Impalement, III Lux Infera

Sacrilegious Impalement: III Lux Infera

I’m what you would call a passing fan of black metal. I can certainly appreciate the blasphemy and vehemence that goes into making some of the most vile and evil music available, but often it’s a matter of there not being enough meat on the bone for my own musical preferences. Just as Sir Mix A Lot likes a little meat on his women, I like my black metal with some bulk — no droning atmosphere or keyboard need apply. Sacrilegious Impalement’s third full-length, III – Lux Infera has just the right amount of burliness packed into their charging black metal attack.

The nine tracks here may not be the most traditional or most innovative material to be released recently, but what they lack in originality they more than make up for in blackened aggression and tinges of melody. New vocalist Wrathprayer does well in his debut with the band, adding vicious screams and maniacal growls to the band’s cold tones and marching riffs. “Angel Graves” starts things off with a fairly standard black metal sound as the guys settle into a mid-tempo slash and burn. The sick lead work on the opening track has a bit of a rock vibe to it beneath the distortion and thundering rhythm before devolving into a churning miasma of blasting drums and swirling riffs.

The one-two combination of “Down the Grim Lord” and “Scars for Scarred Ones” hits like a dump truck full of burning, inverted crosses. The first starts off slowly with mood setting acoustic trills for a few seconds until the flooded gates of Hell burst open, releasing the driving, maddened hordes of demons and the damned. It’s a rolling track with marshall drumming, driving guitars and vicious snarls. The song is quickly backed by the even more powerful “Scars for Scarred Ones” that is dead set on carrying the momentum through your cranial cavity down your spine, shattering every vertebrae and rupturing vital internal organs and it explodes from your freshly rotting gut. The song slashes like a rusty sickle across the throats of the pious with little regard for much else. It’s one of the more blasphemous items on the album.

III Lux Infera isn’t all just straightforward black metal. “Through Punishing Gates” incorporates a bit of a thrash vibe to the chugging riffage while the awesome “Behead the Infants of God” delivers its vitriol by way of a stage diving punk influence — it’s a killer track that personally I’d love to hear more of on future releases. Album closer, the instrumental “Deliverance from Unknown,” summarizes the 45 plus minutes of music succinctly as it jumps from the preliminary ambient start with the sound of a gunshot to a more desolate, frigid feeling of morose.

Sacrilegious Impalement have themselves an interesting album here. It’s definitely black metal, but I think it appeals to me more than some of the band’s peers for it’s outside influences. The band subtly incorporates punk, thrash and death metal into this cleanly produced and powerful sounding album without causing their music to jump to any one specific sub-genre of metal.