Burial Hordes - Devotion to Unholy Creed

August 20, 2009

Reviewer: Matt

Devotion to Unholy Creed is the sophomore album by Greek black metallers Burial Hordes.  Firmly rooted in the Norse black metal tradition, Burial Hordes lifts their basic formula from Hellhammer/Celtic Frost by way for A Blaze in the Northern Sky.  And while starkly representative of the genre’s stagnation, Devotion to Unholy Creed packs in enough strong, dynamic songwriting and tight musicianship to rank itself among the better traditional black metal releases of the year.

I’m a huge fan of black metal, and I really enjoy Devotion to Unholy Creed and am pleased Pulverised Records sent it our way, but it is entirely unessential.  Readers with only a passing interest in black metal and who already own the canonical albums would lead no less rich lives having never heard Burial Hordes.  Genre devotees already own several equally obscure and competent albums released this year and will never be at a loss for a good contemporary black metal album.  There’s much better black metal, even in the rawer, more traditional forms, but there’s also much worse.  Devotion to Unholy Creed has little value as either art or product, but it’s pretty damn good, and good black metal is worth supporting, if only to help weed out the dredges of the genre and clear the path ahead for the true innovators.

Much of the album flies by in a fury of tremolo-picked riffs that, unless you’re paying particularly close attention, won’t jump out at you or even distinguish themselves amongst one another.  Burial Hordes is at their most incompetent in these speedy passages where they are simply mining the motifs of earlier classics.  But here and there, some really great passages stand out.  “Gods Cutthroat” ends with very creepy chanting before blasting into the next track.  The last minute of “Abysmal Goatfeast” sports a pendulum-like iteration of an earlier riff in the song.  “Splendid Destruction” begins with post-punk/black metal fusion bands like Lifelover, throws in some gang choruses, and concludes in a tortured, doomy crawl.  The musicianship is top-notch, at least in the sense that such relatively non-technical music is flawlessly executed.  The transitions are consistently smooth, and with the exception of a horribly misplaced Malefic-sounding vocal in a “hidden track” at the album’s conclusion, the songs follow a literate and intelligent flow.  The studio production accurately emulates the trademark raw black metal aesthetic, and the mix expertly balances the individual instruments.

Devotion to Unholy Creed is a thoroughly enjoyable, entirely acceptable release. Burial Hordes would better spend their time developing around the edges of their commonplace sound and expanding their phrasal vocabulary, but for what it is; Devotion to Unholy Creed is successful.  Ardent black metal fans or casual listeners wishing to flesh out their collections with more underground material would do no wrong in adding this to their collection.

Release Date: 2008
Label: Pulverised Records

TRACK LISTING

1.  Praise the Bloodcode of Hatred
2.  Devotion to Unholy Creed
3.  Infernal Necromancers
4.  Hellborn
5.  Gods Cutthroat
6.  Abysmal Goatfeast
7.  Splendid Destruction
8.  Stench of Immortal Doom

Total playing time:  36:27

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