Impiety – The Impious Crusade Review

Impiety // The Impious Crusade
Rating: 2.5/5.0 — More Bam! Bam! Bam!
Label: Hells Headbangers
Websites: mightyimpiety.com | myspace.com/impietyofficial
Release Date: EU: 2013.09.02 | US: 08.06.2013

albumartOh, look: Yet another short release from quasi-Singaporean blackened death metal squad Impiety. In fact, it’s their sixth EP. Happy Metal Guy doesn’t know if these goat-obsessed militants are just too darned impatient to accumulate enough material to release as full-length albums or overly-attention-seeking dudes who can’t stand not having people talking about and spreading their music around on social media platforms every half a year or so.

Impiety was last tackled in early 2012 (here) and it was meh. My main critique was that the album artwork was more memorable than the music itself. And it’s going to be the main criticism for The Impious Crusade too. Having a whatever-this-artwork-style-is as the cover of a blackened death metal record is quite a departure from the norm of DIY-style, skulls ‘n’ inverted-crosses and hence, it is memorable. But again, there is nothing special about the music. What is the point of having a memorable piece of artwork tagged to an unmemorable album?

The drummer blast-beats as though he only learned how to blast-beat in his drum lessons. Thrashy guitar passages frequently make their aggressive, but unmelodic presence known. Main axeman and harsh vocalist Shyaithan delivers raspy growls dripping with venomous hatred for all things Christian and goody two-shoes. Well, what’s new?

Impiety-Group-1On a positive note, however, that annoying pick scrape that kicked off nearly every song on Ravage & Conquer isn’t as ubiquitous here; it appears only in the tracks “Accelerate the Annihilation” and “The Impious Crusade”. Secondary axeman Nizam Aziz also delivers searing guitar solos that are technical and air-guitar-worthy, with the only problem being that they’re too brief and make too limited an impression; It’s like one of those annoying moments when you catch sight of a cool Easter Egg in a comic-book-superhero movie scene, and although you want to revel in that awesome moment a bit longer, you can’t, because the damn scene only lasts for a split second.

Based on first impressions, this EP actually felt like it would be promising. Memorable artwork aside, the opening instrumental track “Prelude (Arrival of the Assassins)” actually sounds good; it’s rhythmically lively and musical in a mean and evil manner. As a result, there was a hope that this Impiety EP would be a qualitatively better piece of work than Ravage & Conquer. Too bad it turned out to be false hope after all, for when the first proper track (“Commanding Death & Destroy”) kicked in, the music, again, was simply the same ol’ bam-bam-bam type of metal that’s all about sonic aggression and nothing more.

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