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SATANIC ASSAULT DIVISION
Kill The Cross

Black Plague (2015)
Rating: 8/10

Catchy black metal is very much the order of the night here, and what a killer record Danish combo Satanic Assault Division has puked up. Kill The Cross comes two years after the band’s 2013 debut March To Victory and it’s an opus which should please anyone who likes their black metal evil, gnarly and above all accessible.

Considering these guys have only been in existence for three years I’ve been extremely impressed by their releases, and Kill The Cross is the sort of opus that should get tongues wagging and heads turning – as well as banging – within the extreme metal field.

What I love about this record is the thick sound; the riffs are weighty and nasty and complement the hideous vocal burps and yaps of coven leader Thomas Haxen. This isn’t bog standard infectious black metal however; you only have to slap on the title track to appreciate the punky as well as black ’n’ roll quality this bunch has to offer.

The riffs are so meaty that their talons dig in so deep immediately that you’ll find no escape from this stuffy mini-masterpiece. Somehow, Satanic Assault Division successfully fuses an almost traditional metal sludge hinting at old Hellhammer and the likes, with that early 90s Scandinavian blackness. The band lurches into faster, more despicable passages where the vocals are black metal rasps in the truest form, but when the band slows to a brooding, thunderous pace, the voice becomes harsher and deeper, and yet there’s just so much going on here that I would never have placed the band’s origins in Denmark, and that’s no disrespect to that country.

Satanic Assault Division sounds like such a well-oiled machine that any suggestion of the guys being new to the scene would be absurd as they crash through such hideous anthems as the hurtling ‘Defiled By Abalam’ with its hectic drum rushes and hasty guitar seething, while ‘Pleasures Of The Flesh’ and the superb ‘Rays Of Poison’ toy with those gloomier, sombre slower parts while again injecting pace where necessary. ‘Atomic Holocaust’, ‘Evangelical Epidemic’ and ‘Religious Cunts’ are all viciously wicked and blasphemous and remain separated from the mediocre by way of steering from the expected black metal nuances, and instead punctuating those vile clouds of evil with doomier trudges.

In a sense, the vocals are at times reminiscent of Deicide at their most muffled and ungodly when dealing with the deathlier antics, but when the combo speeds up we are truly nailed by some high quality black metal cacophony and yet always dense within its riffage, bass and percussion.

At times there are hints of Impaled Nazarene, but because Satanic Assault Division rarely sticks to one path there’s no real feeling of predictability; the band more than happy to one moment scrape the ears with a deadly dose of seething black metal speed, but the next dragging you into its infernal depths with a more traditional trudge of blackness.

Neil Arnold

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