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Damnation: Destructo evangelio
24/09/13 || Sokaris
After a long vacation from buying music I, much to the chagrin of my wife, picked up a handful of albums recently. Two of my three purchases were bands I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard before. This, the sole album from Sweden’s Damnation, being one of them. Actually, I picked up the disc thinking it was the Polish bunch that operate under the same moniker, the one that’s shared five members and one half of the running time of a shiny plastic disc with extreme metal gods Behemoth. Though my approximation of origin was off, my expectation of quality was not. The Swedish Damnation comes from good stock as well. Essentially a duo consisting of Peter Stjärnvind (skin-pounder for such bands as Entombed, Merciless, Nifelheim, Regurgitate and Unanimated) alongside longtime Dismember/current Unanimated bassist Richard Cabeza. Here they’re known as Insulter of Jesus Christ and Daemon respectively. How does one become an insulter of Jesus Christ anyway? Do you pull his beard and insult his ability to make a bookshelf? I get that it’s a Sarcofago reference but they’re not exactly the best band to pull quotes from unless it’s for a laugh. I guess it proves they’re not falses and that they can entry as opposed to being burned and died.
Apparently the band’s origins stretch all the way back to 1989, though their initial intent was to exist as a Bathory tribute band. A demo surfaced in ’94, a recording the band didn’t follow up on until a full decade later. They’ve since gone quiet but as there’s no official breakup announcement (and they’ve yet to update to the new MySpace) I’m going to assume they’re on a ten year release cycle and expect the sophomore album next year.
So what does a project that first found its legs hailing Quorthon sound like after 15 years of existence? Well, it sounds like fucken Bathory.
Okay, that’s a bit of an oversimplification of the proceedings at hand but I’d say if an act has roots playing another band’s catalog exclusively that kind of informs their intentions. Evile (an ex Metallica cover band) didn’t exactly shock us with their original songs did they? That being said, I honestly got more Celtic Frost vibes in a lot of points. Maybe the guitar tone being more fuzzy than crackly helped paint that picture in my head but the first song proper starts with an “ugh” that Tom G. Warrior would be proud of. We also have the doomy slowdowns that frequently pop up to break up the faster sections and some of them do feel a bit flaked with the ol’ Frost.
The band’s death metal background also seems to influence things as well. Though the guitar sound is intentionally thin and the vocals dripping with reverb, there’s still a lot of meatiness in the production. Another point of departure from their source material is their tendency to write long, multi-passage pieces. Obviously Bathory did epic opuses as a standard in the Viking days but the harsher compositions that defined the early days were generally succinct and chorus-based. The titular call of “Night eternal” does put to mind young Bathory’s first foray into extended track length, “Enter the eternal fire” and I doubt that’s a coincidence.
Overall, Damnation has a more distinct sound than they give themselves credit for. The title track could pass for a Necrophobic pre-production demo and plenty of second-wave and old school death elements help elevate “Destructo evangelia” beyond purely old-school worship. The album art would definitely get lost on the website of a black metal distro (haven’t we used every single medieval woodcut at this point?) and without the covers we’re dangerously close to EP length, but Damnation was definitely worth the price of admission. If you’ve always wanted to hear a merging of first and second wave black metal performed with a death metal spirit then Damnation fits your oddly specific request.
- Information
- Released: 2004
- Label: Threeman Recordings
- Website: Damnation MySpace
- Band
- Daemon: vocals
- Insulter of Jesus Christ: guitar, bass, drums
- Tracklist
- 01. Invocation of the storms
- 02. Insulter of Jesus Christ!
- 03. Night eternal
- 04. Destructo evangelia
- 05. Bloody vengeance (Vulcano cover)
- 06. When creation dies
- 07. Eternal black
- 08. Armageddon (Bathory cover)
