### Satan's Host: The great American scapegoat 666

#### 30/08/10 || Daemonomania

Ever have that dark, disturbing feeling that everything you held to be true and absolute may in fact be false? I’m starting to get that sense of foreboding. Fuck. For years now I’ve taken comfort in the simple premise that black metal = shit. The math worked out time and time again. But after this last Maryland Deathfest, my universe was thrown into disorder. I saw a few bands that were undeniably black metal and were undeniably not shit. We’re talking a mental shakeup of monumental proportions here. Gawd. Damn.

Take our friends in Satan’s Host, for instance. These guys were cheese-metal in the 80’s, broke up, and reunited in the 90’s with the intent to crucify the Wholly One and bake a cake for LORD AHRIMAN. The album cover has an upright snake-tailed goat holding an American flag (complete with stars forming a pentagram) in Hell. There is a song on here called “Cursing, ‘vampyric evil-eye’”. The drummer calls himself – I shit you not – Evil Little Hobbit. When IG handed this to me from his bin ov endless radio show promo discs, I thought it would be tee-ball easy to tear Colorado’s most satanized souls a new asshole. But like the corpsepaint equals craptunes formula, I was wrong.

Thankfully, this is black metal mixed liberally with death metal, so I’m still convinced that most black metal HAS to be bad. Like grind, when DM is mixed in even a largely worthless genre can become cool. Such is the case with Santa’s Toast. They lay down one sweet, Behemoth-style kick to Jesus’ jewels after the next on GAS666. The production is quite clean, the riffs are excellent and plentiful, the vocals are brutal and delivered with passion, and the lyrics are borderline brain damaged. A sample:

AKOMAN SAVAR ANDAR, Releasing Energy.

NAKAHED TAIVREV ZAIRICH The Ultimate Goal Sorcery.

Is this a yoga routine? The menu at a Middle Eastern restaurant? An Invocation penned by Spartacus? Got me. Since most metal has dumb lyrics I won’t harp on it much more though. Regardless of whatever the rest of their albums might sound like, this particular release deserves your attention. Fans of the aforementioned current kings of Poland’s blackened death assault will eat this up. I know I was quite pleasantly surprised.

Does this CD represent a slow backward slide into black metal for de Daemmate? Pray (to TAIVREV!) this isn’t the case. Seriously, what would be next? Polyamory…clothes shopping… veganism?

Information

- Released: 2008
- Label: Moribund
- Website: Satan’s Host MySpace
- Band
- Leviathan Thisiren: vocals
- Margar: bass
- Patrick Evil: guitars
- Evil Little Hobbit (aka Anthony Lopez): drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Invocation 666
- 02. Ave, Lucifer
- 03. Dragons – Darkness
- 04. Azrael: Death Wing Angel
- 05. Great American Scapegoat
- 06. Hail Satan
- 07. 7 Strings, Sin
- 08. Black Order
- 09. Pyromancy, The Art of Fire
- 10. Xeper 22
- 11. Cursing, “Vampyric Evil-Eye”
- 12. Infernal Victory
- 13. Throne of Baphomet