Band:	Demonoid
Album:	Riders Of The Apocalypse
Style:	Death metal, Thrash metal
Release date:	July 2004

01. Wargods
02. Firestorms
03. Witchburners
04. 14th Century Plague
05. Hunger My Consort
06. The Evocation
07. Arrival Of The Horsemen
08. End Of Our Times
09. Death

According to the band's website, Demonoid was formed as a vehicle for Therion members Kristian Niemann, Johan Niemann, and Richard Evensand to play more extreme music. Influenced by darker acts such as Nile and Emperor, they channeled their efforts into this new outlet. The resulting album, "Riders of the Apocalypse," is a Death Metal opus that has all of the aggressiveness of the aforementioned, but at the same time retains that grandiosity that Therion has come to embody for so long.

The music here is fittingly brutal, heavily reliant on heavy mid-tempo riffing and almost-decipherable Death Metal growls. Therion frontman Christofer Johnsson kept this project all in the family by contributing a pummeling vocal performance that does justice to the album's epic subject matter. There is melody here, though not of the Gothenburg variety that one might expect from a group of Swedish metallers, and there is sufficient diversity to keep the listener interested throughout the recording. While the music contains none of the symphonic bombast of Therion, there is a complexity of composition to be found throughout. Demonoid does not create brutality here for the pure sake of brutality, and the instrumentation on this release is more than just a vehicle to show off the dexterity of the players. Each composition is well thought-out in terms of how it marries with the lyrics to convey the desired impression.

The lyrics are suitably dark, particularly in the opening half of the album, which serves as an indictment against humanity. Tracks level charges of callous destruction, environmental contamination, and violent intolerance against mankind, and invite the apocalyptic retribution in the tracks that follow. The latter half of the album yields equal time to each of the Horsemen, culminating in the execution of the Final Judgment.

This is Death Metal on a grand scale. To call this Death Metal for the Dungeons and Dragons crowd may belie the music's ferocity, but accurately captures its majesty. "Riders of the Apocalypse" is aggressive, intelligent metal that thoughtfully expands the boundaries of the Death metal archetype.