Crucifyre – Infernal Earthly Divine (2011)

Hailing from Sweden and featuring members of General Surgery and a few other bands, Crucifyre comes to brand us with their ‘Satanic Death Metal’ with their debut album “Infernal Earthly Divine”. Mixing up Death Metal with some Thrash Metal elements and overal weirdness, the band manages to put together 9 effective tracks of chaos and mayhem.

The first thing we noticed is the singing style of Erik Sahlström (General Surgery), he changes the inhuman growls for a more understandable half growl/half scream approach allowing us to finally understand what the hell he is singing about. The band’s music is fairly standard for a Death Metal album, but there are very interesting moments were the music takes a ‘Thrashier’ sound.

One of the most redeeming elements of this release has to be the samples used here and there to create a more diabolical atmosphere like on “Hellish Sacrifice”. The Satanic themes in this release are very evident and from the titles of the tracks you can get an idea of what the band is all about. However, sometimes the lyrics sound a bit childish and immature (i.e. “Hail Satan”).

The band’s music is actually very diverse between tracks and the riffing keeps things interesting, there are also plenty of tempo changes that break up the monotony and create an effective album, something very distinctive from your run-of-the-mil Death Metal bands. Our favorite songs have to be “Witch Hammer”, “Thessalonian Death Cult” (and its brilliant melodic sections), and the straight forward “The Fetching”.

We are very surprised that we found ourselves enjoying this release more than we expected after several listens, and we are sure that most Death Metal fans will come to appreciate it as much as we did. If you are looking for solid music and a whacky concept (read the lyrics), you will surely enjoy “Infernal Earthly Divine”.

Release: January 17th. 2011

Country: Sweden