Kill the Thought on Christ

My mother's family is from Slovakia, and as such I've been poking around on here over the past couple of months, hoping to find a few interesting Slovak bands to get into, just for the hell of it. Dementor stuck in my head, mainly because of their cool band name and the song titles/lyrics written in hilariously poor English (such as the title of this album). Well, I wasn't coming across any of the Slovak bands I had researched in any record shops (not surprisingly), but just today I came across this Dementor release. Needless to say, I had to pick it up, hesitantly choosing it over the latest Wolf record.

To be honest, seeing that Dementor were labeled as "brutal death metal" in the archives, I was expecting a typical release of said genre: unvarying, blistering speeds, over-triggered drums, monotone guttural vocals, etc. Boy, was I wrong!

What we have here is a pure, no-frills old-school death metal release... from 1997! This could have easily come out in 1992.

Granted, this is nothing new or groundbreaking, and Dementor are certainly not offering anything new to the genre. "Kill the Thought on Christ" is, however, far from generic. All of the riffs are catchy, memorable and varied, switching from brutal to classically doom-ish to fun and thrashy.

The sound of this album is very old-school, also. It's heavy and very bottom-end, with a lot of emphasis on the bass, but it is not over-produced and polished like a lot of the death metal releases of today. Everything sounds very natural, especially the drums, which as I've said above are for once NOT triggered to high hell (this is a good thing).

All in all this is a very solid, catchy and memorable death metal release. Although it is not particularly innovative, I really enjoyed this record from beginning to end. I was not bored for a minute, and will certainly spin this disc more than many other death metal albums in my collection.

Standout tracks: "In the Name of God" and "Suppuration of my Soul," but they're all equally good! For fans of Sinister, etc. and old-school death metal in general!