Band:	Belphegor
Album:	Blood Magick Necromance
Style:	Black metal, Death metal
Release date:	January 14, 2011
A review by:	Doc G.

01. In Blood - Devour This Sanctity
02. Rise To Fall And Fall To Rise
03. Blood Magick Necromance
04. Discipline Through Punishment
05. Angeli Mortis De Profundis
06. Impaled Upon The Tongue Of Sathan
07. Possessed Burning Eyes
08. Sado Messiah

Damn, I thought Belphegor's career was dead for sure. For a little insight into how important this album is to this band, let's take a quick look at this bands past releases: Lucifer Incestus & Goatreich-Fleshcult are arguably their strongest, most evil sounding albums they've ever put out. Pestapokalypse VI took the regular Belphegor style, but played it in a more naked, stripped-down fashion, then everything went wrong. Bondage Goat Zombie saw the band flashing some new claws, but frankly it was too little, too late - everything they did felt pretty tired at that point. Then came Walpurgis Rites...it was horrendous to put it frankly. It was the sound of a band with no direction, no inspiration, and no fucking clue what they were doing; it sounded like a self-parody.

Now, we have a new one. Needless to say, Belphegor are back...well, sort of. For anyone out there hoping this is some incredible bounce-back into glory, don't hold your breath. Blood Magick Necromance is Belphegor accepting where their strengths lie and exploiting those strengths, rather than making some embarrassing attempt at reinventing themselves. They are back to their typical blast-beat fuelled black & death hybrid. Dropping the attempt at crappy mid-paced (by Belphegor standards) melodeath, return to the deep, razor sharp guitar riffs with that slight hint of middle-eastern influence. Relatively speaking, this album is most akin to Lucifer Incestus, instead of that hard, crunchy production we've experienced from them in the past few releases, it's a smoother, clearer sound - no doubt something that can be attributed to the production work of Peter Tagtgren. The softer production topped off with a few more melodic bits makes this probably their most accessible album to date.

It's always good to see a band bounce back to any degree after releasing a shit album, it's something that rarely happens anymore; usually one bad album is just a prelude to a dying career. Yes, Belphegor is definitely over the hill, but at least they've seemed to come to terms with where they belong, and it's unlikely this band will release anything atrocious again, but rather some safe, briefly entertaining career up-keeps. Sometimes you gotta try and shake the metal world with some drastic reinventing, other times you just need to stick with what you're good at - Belphegor have done just that.