Most folks are probably familiar with Darkthrone’s recent shift back to their roots, releasing albums featuring blackened rock n’ roll and punk tunes as opposed to their classic sound of bleak, chilling lo-fi black metal. The recent Darkthrone output always left a sour taste in my mouth, not as if it was entirely bad, but it just simply wasn’t good. Okkultokrati, on the other hand, are playing a very similar style to that sound while actually doing it a service. If you liked F.O.A.D. or Dark Thrones and Black Flags, by all means, keep reading.

In a nutshell, what these guys put on record is melodic punk, distilled through lo-fi production with that hint of faux darkness. At times, they attempt to fall into more noise-y tangents and those are where the album actually lingers a tad too long. The album opens up with two more upbeat punk-y tracks, No Ouroboros and the title track Snakereigns, reminding me of a sped up Celtic Frost. From there, Invisible Ley lays down a doom-y plodding riff before picking up the pace, singing about the old gods and what not, you know, as Norwegian folk do. I Thought of Demons has this vibe to it that reminds me a lot of The Runaways’ Cherry Bomb, if you could imagine that being done by a bunch of Norwegian dudes who love black metal. We So Heavy shows the band trying to create an atmosphere, and it never becomes anything beyond tedious or boring. The vocals shouldn’t be taking the foreground when you’re trying to wrap the listener in a wall of evil sound. Let the Sun Receive Her King closes with a really gritty rocking solo, a mode that should have pervaded the album more. They would have gained a lot in their sound if they had seemed as if they were actually having fun while playing the music, rather than being so stuffy and "dark".

One big issue for this album might be its production. It actually does the lo-fi, post-Transylvanian Hunger raw sound quite well, but my issue is how high the vocals are in the mix as the guitar and drums are rather low in comparison. What they do, they do decently, but whether that is anything I actually want to listen to is another story. I would much rather listen to blackened crust bands like Welkin Dusk, a more epic sound, or Iskra, a more brutal sound, before these guys. Dirty production for the sake of dirty production, just doesn’t work for me. The band sounds their best, when they are blasting away with punky anthems, yet the album clocking in at over thirty-seven minutes just leads to too much filler. In reproducing the black metal aura, they stifled the punk attitude with evil's stodginess.