Black Metal History Month -Serpent Noir :"Death Clan OD"

You can talk about being occult black metal or orthodox black metal , but when you have Thomas Karlson of Dragon Rouge writing your lyrics then I know you are for real. He also writes the lyrics for Therion. They are like a little less angry version of Gorgoroth. They are a Greek band with not much in the way of the traditional greek metal influences. thrash like venom, aligning this with the early German thrash bands who helped paved the way for black metal. The vocals dig down into there gut for more of a deal metal growl at times, though this manages to stay out of becoming just blackened death metal. The guitars have a great deal of both grit and clarity to them so this is very well done, the next question once the initial sting of heaviness fade from the first song is will the songs move me?  Or will they all begin to sound the same?

Spoiler alert I have already listened to this album once so I will go ahead and say the songs  do not take any drastic turns away from what they have already established by the time they get to tho second song "Hexcraft"  This does slow down and works off a darker throb which I appreciate here, but the wheel is by no means beings reinvented. They eventually speed up from the throb midway into the song as they prefer being uptempo. You can hear touches of Dissection in what they are doing with the guitars/ "Asmodeus" starts with more of a darkly majestic gallop and then kinda descends into atypical black metal with a little of a Bathory feel, the more refined Bathory not the more punk early days. They go full blast on "Astaroth".  I am not opposed to blast beats if you can keep it interesting. My spoiler alert was not wrong, this begins to feel more dialed in, the are not working off the same formula but dynamically it feels monochrome. This begins to make each song progressively less impactful.

The chugged gallop to "Necrobiological..." might be more catchy in the headbanging sort of way not in the pop hook sense of catchy. The rule here is cool riffs alone does not a good song make, so we will see how long this lasts. The last song does not do much different than the one before it except for the fact that the vocals are spoken word incantations and not growling,. I will give this album an  8 it might not be the most original album I review all month , but it is well done.