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Ah, Dark Funeral. The Swedish Black Metal stalwarts who will always be a second-rate band no matter how hard they try. After years of increasingly lame output capped by the laughable Attera Totus Sanctus I had pretty much written them off as a band not worth worrying about. Dark Funeral represented the fixed pole star of derivative, generic Black Metal, so will someone explain why this new album is kicking my ass this hard? I cranked this up with the expectation of being lulled into a coma by 47 minutes of high-speed blurbeats and utterly faceless songwriting, instead I am feeling some severe pain in my ass region.

This is Dark Funeral: it's relentlessly fast drums and screeching about Satan, granted. But this time they came up with some solid riffs and just knocked the shit out of it. I haven't heard this band sound this cranked up in years, with blistering cuts like "Stigmata" and "My Funeral", but really, all the songs here are a lot alike. Normally that would be a slam, but in this case it means the neck-breaking never lets up. They got a killer production job this time, and Caligula's vocals sound bad-ass, with real urgency. Sure they aren't doing anything they haven't done a hundred times, but this time they are sure doing it right. This slickly-produced disc is as close to mainstream as Black Metal can get, but it grabs you by the nuts and doesn't let go. I sure as shit didn't see this one coming.