Aeons Of Satan's Reign

As metal has grown as a genre, it's not only needed to find new ways to create extreme sound, but new ways to be evil. As the genre has grown beyond the stuff of pentagrams drawn on notebooks, bands have grown less overt in their menace. Seeking a return to the older, simpler ways, Satan's Wrath have arrived to deliver upon us some good old-fashioned, on-the-nose classicist metal. On Aeons of Satan's Reign, the Greek band looks to revive a style of old-school metal that wears its evil on its sleeve as the bandmembers snarl their way through eight tracks of profane and elemental thrash. While modern metal might have made its way into the mall through stores like Hot Topic, tracks like "Satan's Blood, Lucifer's Fire" and "Only Satan Is Lord" seem like lost artifacts from the '80s meant to scare the PMRC out of retirement. This is a testament to how well Satan's Wrath capture the feeling of old-school metal, with Aeons of Satan's Reign providing a portal to a time before the genre had become splintered into an inscrutable web of subgenres. One cannot survive on nostalgia alone, however, and fortunately the album delivers some solidly written and deftly played metal, with every song bringing plenty of lightning-fast riffs and ripping solos to the table. Aeons of Satan's Reign feels defiantly traditional as it dives into heavy metal's past for dark inspiration, and though this won't earn the album much love from anyone looking for something more progressive, fans of the old school will find it to be a welcome trip down memory lane. ~ Gregory Heaney