### Belphegor: Pestapokalypse VI

#### 05/12/11 || BamaHammer

Few things in life are more depressing than autumn in the American South. The godforsaken heat of the summer that was once as heavy as scorching lead on your back just months before retreats only to be replaced with slightly tolerable temperatures and infinitely shittier weather. I’m also convinced that the early frosts don’t even make the leaves fall off the trees. It’s just the tired boredom of enduring another humid, sweltering summer that makes them hit the ground, a sweet suicidal surrender of botanical beauty.

Yes, it was precisely a time such as this when I discovered Belphegor in November of 2006. I vividly remember driving across the autumnal wasteland of Alabama one evening. The sun had set well before 5:00, and the twilight, as always, seemed to last for hours. As I sat alone in my car at the steering wheel staring vacantly forward, I began to realize that my eyes were growing heavy, my mind was beginning to wander needlessly, and I was in dire need of something more than the usual caffeine fix to escort me the final ninety miles to my destination. I needed a good bludgeoning.

I pulled over at a shopping mall, noticing the prominently boastful record store sign that was beckoning me to come inside, and I gladly obliged. I thumbed through the “metal” section in the store, turning my nose up at the sickening excess of whiny faux-metal bands with a sentence for a name and clad in tight blue jeans. I needed something real, something with soul as black as the night outside, and preferably something with an inverted cross (or two) on the cover.

Then I saw this album.

As soon as I laid eyes on it, I plucked the sole copy of “Pestapokalypse VI” from the rack without even thinking twice. The hellishly bizarre cover with its crow-headed clergymen seemed to make a promise to me that this was going to be an amazing ride. Even taking a look at the goofy back cover with the band in full “grvm” pose was not enough to sway my desire.

As soon as the album began playing, I was obsessed. The incessant, unbridled hatred with which the sound arrives in the ear the first time one hears Belphegor is truly a glorious moment to behold. The guitars possess the subtlety of an army of amplified chainsaws. The hypnotic black-metal-style blasting of the drums leaves you entranced by the disbelief that a band can have that much groove coupled with that much speed. The vocals are infused with a hate from the deepest corridors of the very depths of hell itself. And yet, I find it so beautiful.

I had read great things about Belphegor long before that fall and the arrival of “Pestapokalypse VI”, but I never gave them a chance. These Austrians were tested veterans of the scene who got their start well before the turn of the new millennium and had released other quality expositions in the blasphemous arts like “Blutsabbath”, “Necrodaemon Terrorsathan”, and “Lucifer Incestus”, all of which I explored and enjoyed after I discovered this album. There is just something about “Pestapokalypse VI” that sets it above and beyond all Belphegor’s other offerings.

The drumming on the album is not the fastest or the cleanest blackened death metal percussion anyone has ever heard, but it is a relentless churning inferno that is constantly driving the album forward through whatever stands in its way. Even today when I listen to this album, the sheer might and power of the percussive attack is staggering. The snare possesses an almost overloaded distortion element to its sound, perpetually pounding its way deep into your memory, while the bass kicks are precise, powerful, and ever present.

Helmuth and Sigurd’s guitar work is a brilliant combination of textbook black metal tremolo riffing and infectiously groovy death metal rhythms which create a ridiculously heavy album with enough catchy moments to keep you listening time and again. Such masterpieces as “Belphegor – Hell’s Ambassador” and “Angel of Retribution” are even so good and so secretly melodic that I often find myself singing them to myself in my head for no reason whatsoever other than they are just that catchy, and “The Ancient Enemy” is the fucken gold standard by which all other blackened death metal should be measured. This is pure blasphemous heresy and hostility of the finest metal order, an album that makes me proud to love blastbeats and hate humanity.

There really are no truly weak tracks on this album, but there is one that I decidedly do not enjoy as much as others. “Sanctus Perversum” is a bit subpar, as I find its satanic porn lyrics a bit childish and immature, and the actual song itself just does not possess the same level of quality as many of the album’s more memorable moments.

Belphegor has, of course, released other albums since this one. They gave us “Bondage Goat Zombie” in 2008, “Walpurgis Rites – Hexenwahn” a year later, and “Blood Magick Necromance” this year, and while they are all fairly quality releases, they are nowhere near anything for which I would pull the car over again.

Belphegor : Envoyed from hell by Lucifer, Hell’s ambassador.

Indeed.

This is not a perfect album, by any means, but it’s really fucken close.

- Information
- Released: 2006
- Label: Nuclear Blast
- Website: www.belphegor.at
- Band
- Helmuth: vocals, guitars, bass
- Sigurd: guitars
- Barth: bass
- Nefastus: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Belphegor – Hell’s Ambassador
- 02. Seyn Todt in Schwartz
- 03. Angel of Retribution
- 04. Chants for the Devil 1533
- 05. Pest Teufel Apokalypse
- 06. The Ancient Enemy
- 07. Bluhtsturm Erotika
- 08. Sanctus Perversum
- 09. Das Pesthaus / Miasma Epilog