Behemoth - The Satanist (Death Metal)

Starting off with something that sounds like Incantation's Golgotha played through a distorted tuba, it would be easy to write this band off as another inconsequential Incanta-clone and forget about it, but the reality is much more cringey. Claiming influence from Morbid Angel, Phantom, Incantation, Graveland and other talented underground artists, you would think these guys would express something compelling or at the very least showing an understanding of death metal song writing on this album at some point.

Wrong. What you're left with on the retardedly titled The Satanist is incompetent musicianship, stolen Gateways to Annihilation riffs (as is standard with any Behemoth release), derivative and moronic "ev1l 2Xtreem" lyrics worthy of Watain and a "we drop-tune down to G" nu-meddle gimmick for some kind of inconsequential "ultra-heaviness" that leaves this album sounding like a really huge bowel movement being artificially drawn out to waste over forty minutes of your time.

For a bunch of poser clowns who waste their time writing lyrics on pseudo-occult "anti-Cosmic Luciferianism" and dressing up their stolen Morbid Angel riffs in the Incantation derivative "cavernous" production aesthetic, the music on The Satanist really has no atmosphere and is a mix between "embarrassing even for 1992" underground metal clichés and annoying Fear Factory/Malevolent Creation grooves.

Nothing on The Satanist is structured to have a narrative quality, possess any sort of atmosphere or express any kind of feeling or idea. You have a melange of bouncy grooves played on guitars tuned so low it sounds like Sewer circa Uruktena playing a Korn riff, followed by random Slaughter of the Soul tremolo riffs that sound too generic to have even made an appearance on Reinkaos, a random acoustic/folk influenced interlude with the gimmicky "unusual-for-metal" instruments making an appearance, and finally the "doomy" parts which just sound like a bunch of muted open strings churning out bowel movement noises while a constipated idiot bellows over it all. This is completely stupid even by modern death metal "standards".

This band claims to have some kind of a "legendary" status for being Poland's first "death metal" band, but their music is as inconsequential as that of Brokencyde, and Polish metal musicians should look to Graveland for inspiration, not this tired "2Xtreem" anti-Cosmic shitshow of a band. You've heard it all before, except this time it's just poorly done by a bunch of try-hard posers who mask their mundane Malevolent Creation styled bouncy "death metal" with Incantation production values and Reinkaos-tier tard lyrics and who are expecting some kind of reward for playing unnecessary moronic music that holds itself to no standard of quality whatsoever.

If you want to listen to the same album Century Media and Nu-clear Blast have been shitting out in different flavours since figuring out the "stadium rock dressed up in death metal aesthetics for the sake of edginess" formula, by all means pick this one up. People with more than two functional brain cells will pass on The Satanist, and Behemoth's entire discography altogether, and focus on The Epilogue to Sanity for blackened death metal done right.

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