When you name your band Polterchrist, you need to be fully aware that a good population of the people that will hear it will probably look at the name and mistakenly read "Poultrychrist" or "Poultrygeist," both of which are infinitely better names. Why? Hmm, let’s see, what’s cooler: an ectoplasmic savoir, an ectoplasmic chicken, or a chicken savior? No one cares about a mischievous ghost Christ when you can have a messianic chicken with the tag line "He fried for your delicious sins" or the possibility of having the world’s most brutal haunted house movie. Seriously, have you ever seen a chicken? Those things are mean as all fuck: they will peck and eat anything. Just imagine if a chicken turned into a poltergeist and haunted a farm that gets renovated into a country home for college kids. (Jesus, Troma should pay me for these ideas)

Of course, Polterchrist’s sad choice of name says nothing of their music and contrary to the name and the album artwork (seriously, giant wasps attacking Tokyo?), they can play. Engulfed By The Swarm is an excellent slab of blackened technical death metal with some catchy hooks, great Destroyer 666-influenced vocals, and some of the best nods to Cynic in the industry right now. "Terminal" has one of the best melodic build-ups to some great carnage and "The Battle" puts on an epic finish to an outstandingly solid album. While there isn’t exactly anything too outstanding, I never got bored and would always throw the album back on to hear more of their technical black/death action.

Polterchrist is definitely worth a look. If you want to hear some good blackened tech death, then definitely give these guys a try. I, on the other hand, am packing my bags to fly to NY so I can force Lloyd Kaufman to buy my horror movie idea of Poultrygeist and hopefully get my cock fellated by Michael Hertz. If that fails, I think I can convince Mel Gibson into making a chicken based sequel to The Passion of the Christ…

Written By: Necro-tron