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I confess to getting a bit carried away by Cage's last album, the breakthrough Darker Than Black, which was plenty good, but in retrospect, not really that great. Despite the 5/5 I gave it at the time, I rarely listen to it now, and I skip a lot of tracks. So Cage have staying power issues. Thus I was sure to give their new opus Hell Destroyer plenty of time to wear on me before I reviewed it.

Like Darker Than Black, this new album opens in the strongest way possible with the killer title track (after the inevitable bullshit intro) which is obviously trying to be another "Kill The Devil" and almost succeeds. After this, the album gets rather less interesting, with a whole lot of similar-sounding tracks like "Christhammer", "Abomination", and "Bohemian Grove". The only real points of interest on the landscape from here on out are the excellent "Rise Of The Beast" and the cool "Metal Devil". Interspersed in between are a bunch of lame narrative tracks like "Inauguration", "Cremation Of Care" and "Final Proclamation" which serve only to advance the extremely stupid "Left Behind" style storyline. There are 7 of these worthless bits in total, and their absence would bring the album down to a manageable 14 tracks rather than the mind-numbing 21 listed. The aforementioned story is heavily steeped in modern Xtian bullshit mythology a la The Da Vinci Crap crossed with The Omen, to the point where I have to assume Cage are a bunch of Jesus-fellaters, and this seriously brings down my enjoyment of even the good stuff here.

This album is going to get a lot of salad-tossing as a 'savior of metal' album and 'the new face of heavy metal' and blabbity blabitty. But really, when you trim away all the hype and crapola, there are like 3 good songs on here. They're really good, but they're not superlative by any stretch. Hell Destroyer tries hard, but it's simply not up to the expectations placed on it by either metalheads or the band themselves. A decent album with some killer tunes, but little more than that.