### Impious: Death domination

#### 02/03/10 || Wooderson

While I’ve heard of Impious over the years, I’ve never actually listened to any of their releases until now. After checking out “Death Domination” for my inaugural listen, I feel I deserve to lose a few points on my metal cred for this appalling oversight. Impious delivers death metal of the highest caliber… and I fucken dig it!

“Abomination Glorified” kicks things off and unleashes a relentless attack of Swedish death metal that sets the tone for the next 30 minutes of your life. Filled with blasts and frantic oversized metal riffs combined with Martin Åkesson’s exceptional vocal performance, “Death Domination” is sure to have your neighbors cowering in fear when this fucker is played at the appropriate volume.

For the most part, it’s a non-stop brutal festival of death but once in a while Impious does throw in a couple of surprises. At times there is a Florida death metal influence happening and on a few tracks, they really switch gears. A good example is “And The Empire Shall Fall” which starts off with a nice acoustic passage, accompanied with a sitar and a few electronic beats before the metal gets unleashed. Throughout the song, they also throw in some eerie, synth-laden atmospheric passages which coincides nicely with the absolute epicness of the song.

Drummer, Mikke Norén’s performance is definitely one of the highlights here as his technique and style throughout the recording would make any fan of extreme metal proud. From countless skull decimating blasts to tasty extended double bass runs, Mikke is a fucken machine and his execution alone on “Death Domination” makes it worth the purchase.

As previously stated, I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing other releases by Impious so I can’t compare the production value here to past efforts but this is one slick sounding recording. In the metal world, sometimes having such a polished sound can be detrimental to a band but that isn’t the case here. Everything and I mean EVERYTHING comes through sounding fucken HUGE and crystal clear. I can’t help but think the band was ecstatic with the final results and it just comes across so devastatingly heavy.

While being consistently brutal throughout, “Death Domination” is never monotonous as there is an ample supply of riffs and variation in their song writing that makes this release gratifying even after multiple listens. To sum it up, Impious has released one impressive death metal album and I need a swift kick in the nuts for not giving them a shot earlier.

- Information
- Released: 2009
- Label: Metal Blade
- Website: Impious MySpace
- Band
- Martin Åkesson: vocals
- Erik Peterson: bass
- Robin Sörqvist: guitars
- Valle Adzic: guitars
- Mikke Norén: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Abomination Glorified
- 02. The Demand
- 03. I Am the King
- 04. And the Empire Shall Fall
- 05. Dead Awakening
- 06. Hate Killing Project
- 07. Rostov Ripper
- 08. Legions
- 09. As Death Lives in Me
- 10. Irreligious State of War