Maniac Butcher – Masakr (2010)

After a ten year hiatus Maniac Butcher returns with a powerful Black Metal release that will surely send a lot of crappy Black Metal bands crying to their garage wishing they could craft such hate filled anthems of destruction. The band’s original members Vlad Blasphemer and Barbarud Hrom are back in top form and ready to spread disease through the world of Black Metal.

With six songs clocking around 30 minutes of hate filled raw Black Metal, it’s like the band never left the scene. Featuring a crystal clear production, the band sounds as raw as ever and their music crushes since the first riff. Haling from the Czech Republic, the band writes are their lyrics in Czech, so we can’t really know what they are singing about but all we care about is how brutal and chaotic their music is.

Vlad Blasphemer handles all the instruments in this release, providing powerful riffs and catchy song structures that will please all fans of the genre and will keep them asking for more. The drums are precise and aggressive enough to keep up with the masterful tremolo-picking skills presented in this release. Even the ‘rhythmical’ sections are crushing and demoralizing.

Barbarud Hrom provides a very solid performance in a raspier, more Death Metal-ish sound, creating a thick atmosphere of disharmony that only the old school bands know how to do so well. But don’t think that this dude is growling, since his vocals are as Black Metal as you can get without recurring to the high-pitched shrieks of destruction like countless other bands do.

Songs like “Masakr Kravy…” will make you beg for mercy, but will also satisfy your needs of raw uncompromising Black Metal. The Black Metal anthem “Rozhodnuti nezvratne…” is another of the songs we deeply enjoyed with it’s monstrous rhythmical sections that allow the song to take a whole different shape than the traditional ‘blistering fast’ approach to the genre.

Overall, “Masakr” is probably on the band’s best sounding albums to date. The production behind it is crushing and creates a very powerful album that doesn’t need to sound like shit to be raw and brutal. If you are a Black Metal fan, you shouldn’t miss this brilliant come back release of one of the Czech Republic’s most crushing and infamous bands.

Release: August 10th, 2010

Country: Czech Republic