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Prinicipality of Hell – Fire & Brimstone

Sep 19 • Reviews, The Slumbering Ent • 2462 Views • No Comments on Prinicipality of Hell – Fire & Brimstone

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy reviews the debut full-length from Principality of Hell titled Fire & Brimstone, released via World Terror Committee.

Originality and progress aren’t everything, especially in the world of underground metal, where entire subgenres dedicate themselves to playing music that is a throwback to some cherished bygone era in the history of metal. This is certainly the case with Principality Of Hell whose allegiance to the chainsaw riffs and raw vibe of Venom and early Bathory becomes obvious on the Motorhead-in-league-with-Satan attack of the opening track on this album, ‘Fire & Brimstone’, complete with its chants of ‘black fucking metal!’ ‘Codex Inferno’ brings out the darker, Morbid Tales-era side of this kind of music, with frantic, eerie riffing and vocals that sound like a menacing ghoul’s imprecations. It’s all very blackened and raw and in your face, and the menace outweighs the rocking, which is what sets the effective purveyors of this sort of derivative metal from the misplaced party-animal headbangers.

The rest of the songs after this opening duo follow in more or less the same vein – don’t expect any real diversity on an album like this. Songs like ‘The Bleeding Nun’ and ‘Hellfire Legions’ do what their labels promise: deliver a ton of good, clean Satanic fun. The grooves and melodies are quite effective of their kind although there isn’t really a lot to mark out a lot of these songs from each other.

(via No Clean Singing)

Things improve at the tail end of the album. ‘The 9^th Seal’ has a stand-out eerie intro and I enjoyed the almost Hellhammer-like raw darkness of ‘The Hand of the Hangman’, but the whole middle of the album kind of whizzed past in a mid-paced mosh blur. The Exodus cover which ends the album, ‘Strike of the Beast’ is a nice extra touch, done more or less faithfully but with the grimier tone and approach of the rest of the album.

It’s hard to say much more about this album; it is what it is. The trio who have recorded this album know their influences and they know how to go about emulating them with a modicum of conviction and competence. The songwriting is hardly earth-shattering. If you share the band’s tastes then this is an album that won’t replace the classics on your shelves, but will make a nice diversion if you’re getting a bit burned out on spinning those hoary essentials time and again.