Blasphemy fans, eat your heart out. This is the record you’ve been waiting for.

Seven Chalices marks the first full length from Spanish death/black horde Teitanblood. While their earlier recordings may have been purely raw death/black material in the vein of strict Blasphemy worship, Seven Chalices shows a massive degree of maturity: Teitanblood has moved further into dark death metal territory and crafted a sound that combines a more tempered approach to Blasphemy with the atmospheric despair and horror of Goblin‘s Suspiria themes. Seven Chalices is an album that sounds like it was recorded in Hell and produced by an eldritch beast that killed Lucifer and carved a throne out of the Devil’s corpse in order to rule over all damnation, and said beast has 12000 screaming heads.

The riff work to Seven Chalices is obtuse, chaotic, raw, and down right cacophonic. It swirls, shreds, spirals, contorts, convulses, and finally dies a slow, tortuous death before disappearing behind layers and layers of filth and mist. And when it’s done warping back and forth in nanoseconds, with the bleakest of sound, it morphs again, sounding akin to the Wicked Witch theme from a black metal rendition of The Wizard of Oz.

The drums are really chaotic and hefty, bashing along to the netherworldly war cry of the banshee that is the guitar work. The percussion shifts from forward moving fury to martial-like rhythm, sounding like the march of millions of spectral soldier’s storming from their graves and into the lands of the living.

And the vocals. Oh my. The vocals. The vocalist sounds like he is possessed by several demons, and delivers screeching shrills, bellowing growls, tortured moans, and echoing screams and emissions. You combine this with the atmosphere that ranges from bizarre religious ceremonies to Suspiria scenes to hell pits and the trembling, thick as fog production and you’re in for one of the darkest performances of 2009. H-O-L-Y F-U-C-K!!!

If Ulcerate‘s Everything Is Fire was the technical death metal exemplar of 2009, Teitanblood‘s Seven Chalices is the raw, dirty death/black metal exemplar of 2009. Fucking nice.

Review byNecro-tron