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Impiety > Formidonis Nex Cultus > Reviews
Impiety - Formidonis Nex Cultus

Formidonis Nex Kvltus - 85%

somefella, June 25th, 2009

Fans of Sarcofago and similar bands should check out Impiety, an excellent black/thrash band hailing from Singapore. Though this album is not as good as Skullfucking Armaggedon, it is still an excellent release and worthy of whatever price the local tape-trading dude slaps on it.

Album begins with a quiet, rumbling sound that slowly increases in volume, then you hear the vocals. It's odd, they sound shouted but are mixed kinda soft, it goes " FORMIDONIS, NEX, CULTUS!" and then they unload a huge wall of sound. Thrashing riff, with some minor soloing underneath it, with some pretty intense blasts throughout. This is typical Impiety, a huge amount of intense music that manages not to get boring at all.

Production-wise, it's like Death Magnetic, only done right. All the instruments, except maybe the bass, are given space to breathe, but blend pretty seamlessly to give that wall-of-sound thing. The drums are notably fast and the beats are reasonably creative, not just snare+crash style blasting. Tremor is an amazing drummer, and he shows it pretty well. Guitar tone is raw and crunchy, though lower in the mix than I would like, sometimes you have to listen quite carefully to pick out the riff that's being played.

Best thing about the performance is the vocals. They are clear at times, so you can hear whatever constitues blasphemy for these guys(album art features a church, a mosque and a Hindu temple in flames, a mockery of Singapore's acclaimed multi-culturalism).They are just the right volume and are like a mix of typical black metal vocals and Dave Mustaine at his fiery best. At the end of "Vomit, Jehovah. Vomit!" there is a cool part where everyone hurls and it ends with a spit.

Problem with this album is that unless you get really into the music, it sort of becomes background music. This is to say, not listening closely will leave one wondering when which track has ended and which has started. Minor flaw, if you're driving or on the bus, this is entertaining enough and if you're with friends, brutal headbanging madness.

Not their best release, but by itself a solid album indeed.

Formidonis Next album please - 75%

kaivrykolakas, December 12th, 2007

Finally, after 3 years, another Impiety release. This would be a mixed-reaction review, so brace yourselves!

The strongest point of this album is the intensity of the songs, which brings the listeners back to the days of 'Skullfucking Armageddon' and a little bit of 'Kaos Kommand 696'. The songs are much more intense and fits the band's fist-straight-in-your-face image approach much more than those on 'Paramount Evil'. There are glimpses of majority of Impiety's boasted musical influences in the songs.

The next strongest point of this album is the artwork, layout and packaging. Impiety never cease to amaze when it comes to image and album packaging. The all-black background layout always work for metal releases, especially in Impiety's case, black metal is quite a huge aspect of the band's music. The artwork shows all places of worship burning to the ground, which helps to convince new listeners of the band's extreme anti-religion nature.

This is the point where Impiety's die-hard fans should stop reading the review.

After listening to the cd twice ( or more ), one would be quick to sense that the songs sound similar to some other albums. One would then listen to all of Impiety's earlier releases and begin to realize after closely comparing the songs, that the riffs in this album sounds somewhat similar to the riffs in the other albums. It was a good move for Impiety to cover songs from Vulcano and Darkness. These 2 songs provided a refreshing gust of black wind to the overall stale stench that the album carries.

And the last song, an outro composed from James Bond 007 theme song, is really a pathetic way of trying to add a comedic flavour to the album. Fortunately, this is a bonus song which appears in so-called rare editions of the album.

To conclude, this album is good only because it has the much-needed intensity benchmarked by Impiety's earlier albums, especially 'Skullfucking Armageddon'. It lacks songwriting quality and listeners might assume that the band is merely trying to fill the gap after 3 years without an album.