01. The Mother Of Darkness
02. Their Thoughts Can Kill
03. Ravenous Alien Spawn
04. The Black Queen
05. The Thing That C.H.U.D. Not Be
06. Psychoplasmics
07. Prey To Katahdin
08. Kinderfeeder
09. The Hatchet Murders

Wow. Would you take a look at that album cover. Maybe we should hold a "Metal Storm's Ugliest Album Artwork" poll after all. This has got to be a dead ringer for at least the top 50. That being said, ignoring the Jerry Springer shit going on on that cover, Hymns Of Ghastly Horror is actually a pretty rowdy album.

Death n' roll - it's a title that often disappoints. Not that the bands shoved under that umbrella are frequently bad, but it almost seems like a term used for death metal bands who can't quite be considered "melodic death" but are loaded with catchy groove and a lot of hooks. Revolting could probably be safely put under that descriptor. It's got all the crunch and aggression of some straight forward death metal mixed with a certain level of infectiousness that doesn't quite push it into melodeath territory, yet manages to create enough memorable moments to make each song distinct.

If you're an asshole, and you decide to go ahead and just start listening to the album halfway through, things might feel a bit anticlimactic after reading this review. It seems the further you get into Hymns..., the less frequent these fantastic hooks appear. By the end, you are essentially listening to a pretty standard death metal album, a good one, mind you, but just less notable than the first half. It's cool that they could show a little versatility with their songwriting within the confines of death metal, but it does sort of lose its lustre on the latter half.

A pretty solid death metal album, if you can put up with having to look at that album cover every once in a while, Hymns Of Ghastly Horror should be welcomed into any death metal fanatics collection.