Review by Linus Douglas.

Pek brings death metal of the traditional, direct kind to your table that advances through simple but effective melodic phrases in low register and makes ample use of chromatism. Pek makes a progression between riffs happen, but it is more of an exchange than something that feels “through-composed”. Instead, we find cyclic structures that help expand simple content into longer songs simply by playing upon the replayability of the collection of riffs as narrative paragraphs, which helps the music support itself on more than the complexity of a single riff.

Preaching Evil may not be the most refined work of death metal, but it is direct and honest, in the sense that it is not gimmicky, and it managest to bring more than war metal in the way already described in the previous paragraph. Instead of making the riff the center of attention, Pek focuses on atmosphere, but it does not forget to uphold the traditionalist death metal standards in terms of phrase-through-riff, which keeps the music in an interesting balance that is both conventional and creative. It also does not limit itself to a streamlining process, and will allow for what some call “hell-hammerisms“, and which are simply organic pauses and harmonic minor phrasings within chromatic riff interactions played without rushing.

Drums are the most annoying and may possibly even be produced by a machine; guitars are driven and have a delightfully distorted and degraded sound; the vocals are what some would call “standard” but they manage to deliver a frankly awesome performance that leaves little to be desires. Overall, while there is nothing revolutionary happening here, nor can we find content that flares up the pretentious clitorises of ‘muh complexity’ amateur nerdish minds, the content is satisfying as an experience of darkness. This is a good record for Hessians to enjoy as a total experience rather than nerding about it. Pek’s music is about a hellish apocalypse in an anti-post-modernist way: inverting the inverted, or poisoning it?

Tags: 2008, belgium, Black Metal, death metal, pek, preaching evil, review