Typhon
Unholy Trilogy
[Warmaster]
To say that this is a far cry from what I was expecting would be a severe understatement - I had heard that this album was extremely grim, cold, black, and a huge influence on the fellow Colombian Inquisition. It is true that some definite parallels can be drawn between Typhon and their countrymen in the vocal department, but other than that, this is honestly about as remote from those other descriptions as you can get; the bass lines could come directly off of a Van Halen album, and while the riffs are great, everything is so happy and clean that if it weren't for the vox I'd swear I was listening to glam rock at times! Actually a few of the melodies in these tracks even border upon ballads every now and then, and while nothing actually ever becomes as sappy or sentimental as all that, this could just as easily have been influenced by Skid Row as it was Venom.
However, in spite of everything, and now that the initial shock is over, I also realize I am beginning to love almost every second of this. First of all, once again, those vocals - they are so unbelievably and inhumanly vicious I think my cd player is going to grow fangs and sink them into my arm (contrary to the endlessly cold, monotonous, hatefully machine-like vocals of Inquisition), and the Maidenesque soloing, while overly majestic, is masterful in nature. It's all sort of the same way that you listen to Grand Belial's Key and you realize that although nothing really caustic or evil ever happens to it, the material seems to hit and miss within itself in a way that somehow makes it great and overshadows the bad or seemingly plastic moments. The zombie in the foreground always gives the release enough energy to keep everything moving, and even if this was recorded in the mid-90's it always flows with a thriving 80's sound, in honor of the band's thank you list including Hellhammer, Bathory, Celtic Frost, and Destruction.
The opener, "Once Upon a Time," is a fucking killer and Barzuth sonically spews his undead voice over everything in sight as "Starkey" (metal to the core) is always pounding away a great riff. "The Roman God" and "Fuckin' Jesus" are uniformly excellent tracks and soon thereafter follows the album's first "cover," though it isn't in the traditional form - Dead actually gave the drummer Bull Metal the lyrics and music to "Life Eternal" out of sheer respect before his suicide, and Typhon went on to form a very alterior version of the classic Mayhem song, with a completely different structure and tempo. It prevails extremely well in all of its own respects, and in a sea of admirable tracks this is one of the top highlights.
The follow-up to the cover is another favorite of mine, "Satanic Warfare," but three songs down the road from that is my only real complaint with Unholy Trilogy. Typhon cover KISS' "War Machine", and they do it in such a repetitive and cheerful way that at any moment I keep expecting to hear "I'm just a love machine, and I don't work for nobody but you..." and blah blah blah, obviously you can see there's a serious problem there because I don't want some sort of disco funk in my underground South American black metal, but I'll get over it.
Not at all what I expected, but a great album nonetheless. Overall, if you can stomach the shortcomings, you're going to get not only a slab of immense thrash but something that simply rocks all the way through.
© 2002 hando
However, in spite of everything, and now that the initial shock is over, I also realize I am beginning to love almost every second of this. First of all, once again, those vocals - they are so unbelievably and inhumanly vicious I think my cd player is going to grow fangs and sink them into my arm (contrary to the endlessly cold, monotonous, hatefully machine-like vocals of Inquisition), and the Maidenesque soloing, while overly majestic, is masterful in nature. It's all sort of the same way that you listen to Grand Belial's Key and you realize that although nothing really caustic or evil ever happens to it, the material seems to hit and miss within itself in a way that somehow makes it great and overshadows the bad or seemingly plastic moments. The zombie in the foreground always gives the release enough energy to keep everything moving, and even if this was recorded in the mid-90's it always flows with a thriving 80's sound, in honor of the band's thank you list including Hellhammer, Bathory, Celtic Frost, and Destruction.
The opener, "Once Upon a Time," is a fucking killer and Barzuth sonically spews his undead voice over everything in sight as "Starkey" (metal to the core) is always pounding away a great riff. "The Roman God" and "Fuckin' Jesus" are uniformly excellent tracks and soon thereafter follows the album's first "cover," though it isn't in the traditional form - Dead actually gave the drummer Bull Metal the lyrics and music to "Life Eternal" out of sheer respect before his suicide, and Typhon went on to form a very alterior version of the classic Mayhem song, with a completely different structure and tempo. It prevails extremely well in all of its own respects, and in a sea of admirable tracks this is one of the top highlights.
The follow-up to the cover is another favorite of mine, "Satanic Warfare," but three songs down the road from that is my only real complaint with Unholy Trilogy. Typhon cover KISS' "War Machine", and they do it in such a repetitive and cheerful way that at any moment I keep expecting to hear "I'm just a love machine, and I don't work for nobody but you..." and blah blah blah, obviously you can see there's a serious problem there because I don't want some sort of disco funk in my underground South American black metal, but I'll get over it.
Not at all what I expected, but a great album nonetheless. Overall, if you can stomach the shortcomings, you're going to get not only a slab of immense thrash but something that simply rocks all the way through.
© 2002 hando