Awaked by Impurity Rites

Awaked By Impurity Rites is a great death metal album with a misspelled titled. It was released by Brazilian band Sanctifier in 2001 and has a sound contemporary to that era. It is straight forward, right to the bone death metal with no (at least rare) melodic or slamming parts that fucks up the style (don't get me wrong, I like both real melodeath and slam death, with the key word being "real").

The overall concept is fast, shredding riffs with blast beats and double bass to match, which is a concept done and done before and proven successful. With that in mind you might, like I did, get the feeling "Yep, heard it before" but it works fine, no reason in trying to fix something that is not broken. The vocals is mostly not-to guttural but still deep growls, with the occasional screams. The lyrics are the usual evil kind with a Morbid Angel-esque ancient mystical twist to it, but since the vocals are of the indecipherable sort you are not going to notice any of them anyway. Solos are great and plentiful, which I think we all want in a metal album, no matter which genre. The production is dynamic and clear and keeps a chunky feel to it. Also it features a cover of the song "Thou Art Lord" by black/death metal band Acheron.

To summarize this, Awaked By Impurity Rites is classic death metal offering with a more modern sound that will please most death metal heads with an open mind.

Recommended songs: They are all equally good.

I give it a solid 8 / 10. It does not break any new grounds but it gives me what I want.

Originally written for http://thrashers666.freeforums.org/

I understand that Brazil has a reputation for spawning awesome metal bands; Sanctifier carry on the tradition by pounding out relentless death metal.


What really grabbed my attention when researching the band were the lyrical themes that permeate the album. I'm always interested in bands that deviate from the norm in any way and I thought it was cool that Sanctifier did too. Instead of singing about hate, death, the apocalypse, or other overused DM lyrics, chutlu mythos are the theme that Sancitifer chose to explore, much like Nile explore Egyptian themes.


I would use the word "juggernaut" to describe how this album sounds. Full of choppy drumming, sudden tempo changes, blast beats, and plenty of tremelo picking, Sanctifier rely on this time-proven recipe for death metal. The music is pretty simple and straight forward but is actually quite varied at times. Some parts are very fast with hectic drumming, some parts are slower with the "playing in the pocket" half-time feel. At first I thought that variation was lacking in the music, but that went away after I really absorbed the album. After that I decided that this album is solid. Tracks that stand out are 1, 3, 8, and 9.


Guitars are the core sound of a band. There are some very cool riffs on this album. Just listen to the intros of "Abominations Rise" and "Zi Dinger Kia Kampa" and you'll know what I'm talking about. Nice riffing that reminds me a little of MA's Covenant. I love how the guitars play around with disident melody that sounds ugly in the most beautiful way possible. "Al Azif" is really the only song that doesn't follow the same formula as the rest of the album. My only complaint is of the vocals. They sound like cleaning your ears with sand paper and they're gutteral as hell.