Lord Belial "Angelgrinder" Cassette

I believe this album is Lord Belial's finest work. They started as a very mediocre black metal band. For this album they stopped using pseudonyms and removed all make-up. Their musical style changed as well. After playing a very melodic black metal, they play now a more complex black-death metal. Insofar as they get closer to death metal, their music sounds more extreme and brutal. Moreover, the album production is better and the music too. Lord Belial did not get rid of the melodic passages at all, but kept and included some of them here and there. Nonetheless, now these melodic passages make sense insofar as they contrast with the brutal and fast passages. Lord Belial achieved musical maturity through Angelgrinder.

Changing times seems to call for changing sounds, or so it would seem if the tendency of Scandinavia's black metal scene following the close of the 90s has anything to say on the matter. Naturally these changes did not come abruptly with the ushering in of the year 2000, as indications of a heavier, higher fidelity sound with downplayed degrees of mysticism and coldness were already being observed by Behemoth, Dimmu Borgir and Emperor just prior to Y2K. Lord Belial seemed to be smitten with the Behemoth approach of leaning a bit closer to a death metal sound while still keeping the blackened aesthetic in view, though they also took a cue from Emperor in the image department and decided to ditch the theatrical imagery in favor of a down-to-earth metal head image, though their fourth and final offering with No Fashion Records Angelgrinder is lyrically and aesthetically still bound to the cliche imagery of the earlier 90s.
In many ways, Lord Belial was always something of an odd band out even within the confines of the Swedish black metal scene given their continued affinity with the technical trappings of early black metal's death/thrash roots, complete with shredding guitar solos and a somewhat heavier rhythmic stomp accompanying the shimmering atmosphere that cut against the minimalist character of much of the second wave. But here the combined guitar sound and overall militaristic character of the production finds this outfit mixing ideas appropriate Immortal and Darkthrone with brutal sounding riffs more in line with early Cannibal Corpse and even Suffocation at times. It's not as if this tendency is an occasional factor that is bandied about occasionally, as right square at the onset of the title song a galloping thud like an outtake from Tomb Of The Mutilated paints much of the song and gives what might otherwise be a conventional revisiting of mid-90s Satyricon territory with occasional keyboard and acoustic trappings a unique twist.
The death metal tendencies of this album are naturally not limited to a few token riffs that invoke a greater ratio of brutality on an otherwise dark and melodic affair, but are an ongoing foil to the latter and paint a horrific visual of Dante's Inferno with a stronger emphasis on the carnage of the hapless victims of demonic wrath. "Unrelenting Scourge Of War" is one of the more interesting affair as, much like the title song, it features a heavy degree of typical melodic black metal shimmering goodness and a few isolated consonant flute passages, but also includes a chunkier and heavier guitar sound that might elicit comparisons to one of the harder hitting Gothenburg bands, not to mention a lively set of lead guitar lines that would make Chuck Schuldiner proud. Likewise, "Kingdom Of Infinite Grief" starts off with a biting series of riffs that recall an American death metal sound that is perhaps bordering on early Deicide, but the guitar tone has that brutality factor that points to Pierced From Within.
For a band that is generally passed up for their older and more prolific contemporaries Marduk and are seen as a tag-along band with little unique to offer the scene, Lord Belial makes a very good show at bucking most of the cliches associated with the black metal sound here, in arguably a more pronounced way. Ultimately their 90s material proves to be superior given that the heightened mystique of the production made their accomplished musicianship and subtle death metal tendencies a bit more intricate and even surprising at times, but this is definitely a solid offering that very effectively adds a greater aesthetic of violence and impact to a style that is more generally associated with atmosphere. Whether one's poison be grinding fury or a main course of mid-90s blackness with a side order of Swedish and American infused death metal, these songs are laced with plenty of it.

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