From the forum:
Satan is dead. At this point it’s clear that you either go full Nietzschean with materialism, and try to find inspiration from aesthetics, or try to find a religion outside the humbling dualism of Christianity. People are choosing religion, demographically, and religion is getting more scientific because it must to not get blown away by changes in attitudes. At the same time people are also getting more conservative because the modern disaster has finally started to show. We’re totally out of control of this society because everyone is equal, so you can tell no one that what they’re doing is bad (unless it’s really obvious, like murder or mass orphan rape). All religious people with brains are starting to adopt a Blake/Emerson transcendentalist view which refutes dualism, although the dumb masses are always going to need some kind of absurd promises. This means the point in being Watain is not there anymore, since they’re fighting against a phantom from the 1980s, when we all thought Christian conservatism was going to destroy us all. It turns out the Christian conservatives saved us from the Soviets, and now we’re seeing that the hippie way of life just leads to more pollution, hatred, racism, misery and despair.
Futurist metal is going to take a Marshall McLuhan/Voivod approach. Like the best of sentimental mysticism in metal, it will probably embrace the idea of a world beyond this one, although not a dualistic one, more likely one in whatever n-space “m theory” or quantum entanglement proposes. Instead of being humanistic, it will focus on exploration, conquest and discovery. This will be how it transcends the Christian dualism and Jewish guilt-based morality that is inherent to all Abrahamic religions including Islam (and at this point, Judaism has been too Christianized to survive the onslaught, which is sad as it was the last hardcore literalist religion). Nietzscheans in space, exploring micro-organisms, finding ways to tie occultism and Platonic forms to our new knowledge of sub-atomic particles, string theory and emergent patterns. When you think about it, all prog bands want to be Voivod without the candy parts anyway. – Pray for Satan
Satanism in metal is so 1980s. Back then, a revolution: discover the occult under the slick modern skin that was really only three decades (one generation) old. So when people head for the safe, you remind them of death, mutation, disease, suffering, defecation, sodomy, and occult insistence that Evil is as important as Good, and that’s another way of saying both are human perspectives only. Nature doesn’t care whether it does evil or good, it just does what it must. But now, in the 2000s, everything is permitted. We need a new mythology, not a negation. If you have Satan, you need God; if you have God, you need Satan. Now, we all know that Jesus Christ is a liberal, a Communist and probably a free-market anarchist or at least free-love hippie. But he’s sort of immaterial, he’s a popularization of the Old Testament message. Whatever God we have, it’s the same God, much as we say the word God in many different languages; every religion describes the same world, the same God, and struggles with the anthrocentric concepts of Good and Evil. If you have Evil, however, you must have Good and vice versa. So it’s time to reinvent the mythology from within. If you want to destroy Christianity, take it back to its Pagan (Greek) roots and admit the archetype for Jesus Christ was Socrates. If you want to destroy modern soulless Judaism, embrace the original demi-gnostic hermetic Judaism. We are all together in each of our nations fighting for the same world, and different interpretations of the same truth. Metal needs to embrace the futurist aspects of science joined with a mysticism of logic that doesn’t depend on a dualistic god or inherent meaning.
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Production: The first three tracks showcase the studio work of Jim Nickles, and make the latter three, which are awful tape-grade garage production, sound like a middling 1990s studio with moderate volume, good tone, and reasonable bass. For the most part, he’s album to separate the instruments, which avoids the kind of washout frequent in recordings of this era.
Metal audiences and listeners, aficionados of a genre that is well known for it’s enthusiasm towards the macabre will always have the generalization of being attached to the horror genre. A very recent 
‘Invader’, ‘Savage’, and ‘Better By You, Better Than Me’ are all anthemic, semi-melodic numbers that are more standardized than anything else on this album, and is easily of the quality of the best material that permeated the disappointing predecessor Sin After Sin. As is with much work within earlier NWOBHM, this creates a solid base that allows for the most joyous segments of this album to thrive so well. ‘Beyond The Realms Of Death’ which is by many seen to be a seminal piece for this band, is an excellent piece of balladry, to which a clear lineage of the more subtle, ‘slow burning’ work of Iron Maiden (“Children Of The Damned”), Manowar (“Valhalla”, “Bridge Of Death”), Bathory (“One Rode To Asa Bay”, “Twilight Of The Gods”), Metallica (“Sanitarium”, “Fade To Black”) can trace a root. With the exception of perhaps their triumphant Painkiller opus, this remains their most consistent and advanced work, and shows an act at their most vital and relentless. Metal was forged here.
As death approaches, documentation increases. As a circle closes, individuals are given an oppurtunity to reflect on, track and document the meandering course that a society, individual or movement took and assess and re-evaluate this course to determine both its moments of strength and those of weakness. One consequence of this tracking and documentation is that the diligent and astute student of life is provided with an opportunity to discover those behavioural patterns that have been forged in the fires of history and are therefore conducive to success. The intelligent will reflect upon these lessons and apply them to their own worldview, life, ideology or movement and increase the quality, although not necessarily quantity of those lives. Therefore, we serious Hessians take the outpouring of heavy metal documentation rather serious, as it contains for the discerning, the lessons upon which the ideological, and perhaps spiritual foundation of a new spring, a new dawn and a new beginning for our culture may rest.
