You wait nearly a year for a new Satanic Corpse CD, and then two arrive in your postbox at once – Belial and Morbitorium.

 

Satanic Corpse’s debut, Allegiance of Darkness, featured an unusual combination of thrash guitar and melodic keyboards, which when put together with Belita Adair’s vocals – ranging from a possessed, raucous snarl to haunting and lyrical - created an album that was by turns brutal, dreamy and poetic. Allegiance was a significant challenge to anyone who might claim not to like Black Metal.

 

Those that got past their initial prejudices to enjoy Allegiance will find that they will enjoy Belial as well: it offers another 6 tracks of metal, elegant keyboard arrangements and Belita’s haunting vocals. The thrash guitar is there in the title track, Belial, but there are also rousing pipe-organ in the track I Want Your Blood, and melodic arrangements such as Eaten By Worms.

 

However, I am going to almost skip over Belial in my haste to talk about Morbitorium.

 

The latest album features 13 more tracks of audible darkness from Satanic Corpse, but this is a very different album from the previous two and is very much a departure, reflecting some of the work that Belita is performing live around the Las Vegas area.

In one word, the album is atmospheric. It is heavy with oppressive and brooding effects, bordering the ambient, and some tracks such as Portal have a filmic quality about them. There are tracks which feature metal guitar as the previous two albums have, but these are just part of an overall soundscape … and when the crashing guitar chords do come, they sound like the arpeggio to an anthem.  Belita seems to be more confident in the medium of Black Metal and prepared to take it even further than she has now – unafraid of leaving behind those who want only the sound of brutal guitar hammering.

 

Here you will find thundering organ chords, eerie atmospheric vocals and Belita’s possessed vocals sibilantly hissing half-heard words from some language from the world of shadows.

 

Change to track We Are Death or Blue Walls and you have soft piano and slow, almost spoken lyrics intoning a litany. Change again to Cold Inferno or Entombment and you hear, through an electronic haze, a demonic voice, reaching out to you as if from the static between television stations….  disturbing.

 

There are a number of tracks on this album, particularly Portal and Satanic Death Mass which make it particularly suitable for playing in the ritual chamber to create the right kind of dark and atmospheric mood for successful workings.  Morbitorium is broader, darker and more sophisticated than previous Satanic Corpse material, and we strongly recommend it.

 

Belial and Morbitorium can be bought/downloaded from www.sataniccorpse.com