This is a rather late paean to a band that have been raved many-a-time over the past month or so and interviewed constantly as such. Finally, these Singaporean noisemongers are getting what they deserve! Seeing as how Abhorer and the first Impiety releases have been covered in this website already, I seek to shed some light on perhaps *the* most crushing, hell-for-leather piece of digital recording to ever peer its head out of the Asian underground.

Adorned with an all-out irreverent packaging that should serve as relish for the obsessively blasphemous, Impiety have presented us with an album that defies their geographical location, proving truth to the tale that black metal is not an art restricted to an elite few nationalities (fuck that oft-referred to cliché). If you’ve had a run-in with Impiety before, you’d know that they peddle nothing but the most unrestrained and unrefined form of cult black-thrash, littered with musical references to glorious ages once past. Here, they serve more of the same, only more refined, more focussed and more rabid than ever.

The Impiety equation is quite simple, really. On the surface, you have the average blast-beat based black metal band churning out incessant, intense walls of noise for the discerning need-for-speed alcoholic. Dig a little deeper, and you find a olden integrity lost in so many present-day pseudo-evil forest wankers, a dense and claustrophobic aura of everything Motorhead, Sodom, Hellhammer, Blasphemy and Beherit, streamlined and concealed within a harsh crust of vicious snarls and blastbeat mayhem. Parallels can perhaps be drawn to the Australian scene in some senses, (Destroyer 666 and Bestial Warlust are perhaps the most apparent), but even the Australian barbarity doesn’t come close to mixing barbarity and old-school worship into such a potent and forceful melange, and yet come off sounding so focussed and individual.

The song quality on show here is generally a lot more consistent than we’ve come to expect from Shyaithan’s bunch, where songs used to degenerate into monotony once, they now enthrall throughout and round out to achieve a supremely well-balanced effect and leaves you lingering for more, where it once might have frustrated a little. Each song is a molotov of firebrand quality, throwing in layers of truly old-school, unashamed retro with a helluva lot of undiluted aggression. In a word, cult.

There really isn’t that much left to say here, and if I’m forced to make a complaint, it would have to be that the production, while a vast improvement over the past two offerings on Shivardasana, is still haphazardly lacklustre and robs quite a bit of enjoyment from the album. Impiety could very well have had a flawless show of brutality with this offering , but the production makes them come a little short.

Make no mistake though, this is true alcoholik black war for even the most discerning and ‘elite’ bastards out there, and is sure to please anyone who has been keeping an eye on any of the following contemporaries: Abhorer, Sargatanas, Destroyer666, Baltak and Bestial Warlust. Perhaps a little objectivity has been lost in this review, considering the fact that I’m a long time fan, but there isn’t a doubt in my mind about recommending this to any of you who even remotely consider yourselves an underground soul. To obtain a copy: e-mail Dies Irae at falmi@singnet.com.sg or dayofwrath@mailcity.com

© 2000 equimanthorn