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I was unable to find any info on this band at all, so I have no idea if they are defunct, active or what. Just as I have no idea if this is their only release. Pavement is not a label I expect to find Black Metal on, but there you go. I got this used just on a whim, and even from the cover (which looks like some kind of Power Metal album cover actually) I could not tell what to expect.

This is fast and blasty BM with a thrashy edge to it. Battlelust are not melodic in the least, and this disc pretty much charges full speed ahead for the whole running time. The songs sound very similar, and the general impression is of one 40-odd minute song with breaks at random intervals. The vocals are the expected shriek, the drumming is fast and competently done, but the guitars inject a little thrashy verve into the otherwise indistinguishable blur of noise and speed, and this keeps the music from becoming utterly featureless. In places this reminds me of Forest Of Impaled, in others a bit of Carnal Forge. This disc is generally enjoyable for fans of the style, even though it is quite harsh, but the one-dimensional songwriting really gets monotonous by about track 6, and it's hard to listen to the whole thing at a sitting.

The cover is a very amateurish painting of castles and flying dragons that made me think this was going to be euro-Power Metal at first. The lyrics are pretty cool, if nothing revolutionary, but there is at least a minimum of the 'I hate God' themes that I am so tired of. Bellowing about being evil and killing stuff is cool, but if I hear one more song about 'Hypocritical church of lies' I'm going to puke leeches.

So this is OK, nothing to get really excited about, but not bad. If you are in the mood for some hyperfast BM that makes no nods to melody or accessibility, then this might do the trick. There are plenty of better albums to be sure, but there are plenty worse.