After years of expectation, Hell Militia have finally delivered a full length. Hell Militia is composed by members of some of the most known bands of France, including Mütiilation, Vorkreist and Arkhon Infaustus; so as you can now understand, the hype surrounding this release was quite high, unfortunately the result was nothing special.

In this album we find the French musicians creating a bit modern sounding Black Metal, which is by no means bad, but that doesn’t present anything new or special. If you removed the Death Metal part from Vorkreist and Arkhon Infaustsus, and you added a modern touch to Mütiilation you would probably get Hell Militia.

The album is or fast tremolo picking driven or mid-paced hypnotic, but there’s some there’s some serious lack of originality on the album. The album reminds me of De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas at times, including Will’s (Mütiilation) vocals which sound similar to Attila’s at some times. Something that the band does manage to do quite efficiently is the tempo variation during the songs, which can manage to go from slow to fast to mid-paced; but even with these tempo changes the songs’ structures are quite bland, and there’s not something that really makes you keep coming back to the album.

The album’s production doesn’t help a lot either, not because of lack of clarity, but because it lacks competence. The guitars aren’t high enough to add power to the album, but they’re aren’t low enough to become very hypnotic, and that can be frustrating; it’s like when you've got insomnia, you’re tired so you want to go to sleep, so you’re laying in bed, but you’re not tired enough to fall asleep.

In general we have a bland album, with some Mayhem like moments and with some nice riffs here and there, but nothing amazing, specially when compared to other Black Metal albums. This one fails to impress me because this has been done before, and it has been done better.