Satan Tottendemon Victory!!!

Chile is crawling with death metal at the moment; seems like every other day that I am sent demos by bands like Ancient Crypts and Oraculum. And they all tend to gravitate towards the more virulent and unreconstructed end of the spectrum, just as other geographical scenes are taking more left turns. Diabolical Messiah are among the most thuggish and malevolent of the lot. Satan Tottendemon Victory!!! was first released in 2010, but is now getting a vinyl release on Blood Harvest, and it is a relentless bludgeoning album affording the listener absolutely no comfort or respite. As you might expect, I guess, from a record with three consecutive exclamation marks in its title. Dunno what a ‘Tottendemon’ is; possibly a reference to a shite football team.

Anyway, what drew me to this initially was the sheer feverish energy whipped up by the band’s dense and defiantly simplistic approach. Pablo Nanculeo’s riffs are straightforward, but always fast and warlike. It conjures earlier Angelcorpse, and perhaps the blasphemousness fervour of Impiety so long as you hastily discount any of the will to experiment the latter have hinted at recently. The drumming is ceaselessly un-nuanced, and the strangled solos are strewn only sparsely throughout. Even aside from the explosions and gunfire samples, it has a punishingly militaristic feel; you, the listener, are there to be crushed like a new recruit. Celestial Ceremony opens with these urgent staccato riffs like machine gun bursts, and the tone is set.

The relentlessness that initially drew me to it is probably the reason I will probably not listen to it many more times. It exhausts itself in less than half an hour. The best songs are the shorter ones; for example Perverse Domain, at about the length of a verse-chorus-verse punk song, with its dense and utterly humourless riffs. Gruelling and pitiless, and I can see why it would be considered a cult favourite among those that don’t want any light or nuance at all in their extreme metal.