Origin: Paris, France Release year: 2012 Label: Agonia Records Genre: Black Metal The advantage of having little time to review albums due to work is that there is more time to listen to albums. Consequently, Vorkreist’s Sigil Whore Christ has been on duty in my laptop’s CD/DVD drive for many hours.

Sigil Whore Christ. I guess you won’t be surprised if I tell you Vorkreist deals in Black Metal. The French band – they’re from Paris – have been active since 1999 and have released albums that all start with S and leave little to be guessed about the band’s lyrical content. Sermons of Impurity, Sabbathical Flesh Possession, Sublimation XXIXA, Sickness Sovereign. You get the picture: Satan’s the big man in the eyes of these dudes.

The band consists of five guys in standards line-up: LSK (bass), D. Terror (drums), A.K. (guitars), EsX (guitars) and Saint Vincent (vocals). Funny names, in true Black Metal style.

The band itself has referred to the album as “catchy as hell, brutal as fuck, and still with this overwhelming feeling of sickness”. In my view, that’s only partly true. The album is only half catchy and of average brutality. The overwhelming feeling of sickness, on the other hand, definitely is always present, but the band did not need to resort to poor recording and production to achieve that effect. The band’s focus on (anti) religion is amplified by the use of a Latin song title for each of the nine songs the album carries.

Vorkreist start off extremely well with De Imitatione Christi. The main riff is catchy as fuck, a deep and grooving chug that carries the band’s musical message across. There is speech, sermons of the occult, as well as eerie tunes. If anything the main riff is a bit repetitive throughout the song, but one moment of the chorus serves to forget about that completely. Blast beats and tremolo picking are present in abundance and are combined with a rich vocal pallet, exhibiting Black Metal screams and brutal growls and everything in between. Standing out are the beast-like grunts that sound as if hell’s demons have shown up in the studio to have their say about the matter.

After this strong start, Vorkreist follow up with several songs that are much in the same vein, but mostly lack a catchy riff like the opening song. Maledicte has elements of eighties Thrash and some wah-wah leads. The song has several memorable moments, including a flaming raw guitar solo that again refers back to ancient Thrash. Overall, Maledicte isn’t quite as evil-feeling and its qualities as a ‘song’ are more apparent, meaning it’s more music and less a collection of sounds from the underworld.

Deus Vult, Latin for ‘God Wills It’ a frequently outed war cry of Christian crusaders in Medieval times, is generally slower, with a deeper and more elemental groove. The track features several elements borrowed from Old-school Death Metal and may just be my favorite on the album. Rather than a mere complaint against the Christian religion and a praise to Satan, it is an actual song with story-telling capability.

It’s hard to say exactly when things are losing punch, but at some point into the record things start to get a bit boring. The band is losing momentum and seems to get stuck in a pattern. Individually, most songs wouldn’t necessarily suffer, but as a collection forming an album they fail both to build on each other or contrast with each other.

As a result, Sigil Whore Christ does not manage to surpass the average, despite the band members’ evident qualities as musicians. I guess what I mean to say is that it’s all fast and acid and unrelenting and brutal and evil and what not, but it fails to get a musical point across, simply because any would be point is emotionlessly captured in a formula, drowned in the violence.

My Grade: 7.0/10
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Tags: anti-Christian, black, French, review

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