Nostalgiah

Gestapo 666 are somewhat of an underground 2 man black metal 'super' group, featuring none other than Satanic Warmaster's (and the countless other bands he's featured in) Satanic Tyrant Werwolf, and Noktu of Mortifera/Celestia/Peste Noire fame. Also, Meyhna'ch of Mutiilation used to feature in the earlier line up, so the band's heritage certain has some meat on its bones to say the least. Their debut album from 2005 was certainly a contender for The Black Legions sound-a-like for the year award, with its fizzing evil riffage and its low-fi sounding recording certainly grabbing my attention.

This, the band's 2nd album comes in a very similar fashion to its predecessor, albeit with a slightly better production quality and more varied pace between songs. Although it features the aforementioned Finn Werwolf, this is a very French black metal sounding album again, with all the miserable occultism and chiming, discordant riffage you would expect (nay, demand) from such a band. The guitars are strangulated, battered and feeding back one moment, before slipping into a Transylvanian Hunger-like riff-o-rama the next (this is a very riff based black metal album, as opposed to a hypnotic, repetition reliant Burzum-like affair), adding to the fury with time changes, fast non-palm muted riffage, deep gurgling black metal vocals and tumbling drums which cascade throughout the whole album, adding defiant stability to the free-flowing waves of riffs.

As you may guess with the bands politically correct-provoking name, they do have a NS edge to their artwork and lyrics, but one with an seemingly out-of-place Satanic theme running through it too, giving the whole thing a slightly tongue in cheek feel (I mean, come on – they're called Gestapo 666? How much more cheesy can you get?!). It's not even that they're promoting Nazi occultism when you read the lyrics; it seems that they just wanted to incorporate both NS and Satanism into their lyrics, as well as their band name. However, let this somewhat hard to take seriously approach put you off from what is an excellent album, well worth any black metal fan's attention.

Originally written for www.metalcrypt.com