Belfegor

The Kingdom of Glacial Palaces (WWIII)
by Paul Lee

I was waiting for a decent band to attempt Immortal’s frost demon style of relentlessly vicious, frozen black metal (in this case, it’s Immortal’s Pure Holocaust-era sound with a dose of Darkthrone for nasty measure), and so we have Belfegor from Poland. This trio whips the sonic world into a frenzy with their relentless attack and a bounty of tried and true malevolence with hardly any originality. But damn, they do it well. Certainly, Belfegor have chops and technical skills aplenty, but little in the way of diversity or uniqueness. Almost every track has the same rapid-fire approach with the insanely fast, sweep-picked melodies and non-stop blastbeats. The singer even croaks/roars like Immortal’s Abbath and Darkthrone’s Nokturnal Culto. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that someone is trying something other than recreating another Emperor album, and I enjoyed The Kingdom of Glacial Palace well enough, but let’s face it, there is and should be only one band that sounds like Immortal, and that’s the icy boys from Bergen.
(PO Box 4517 Downey, CA 90241)