Description

German pressed music cassette. Red cassette with black text. Limited 250 copies

At first glance, Acheron seemed like your run-of-the-mill, early-’90s death metal band — no different from hundreds of others ripening like so many oranges under the Florida sunshine. But a closer look quickly revealed the group’s altogether more sinister mission, one that reflected the devil-worshipping ways of leader and guitarist Vincent Crowley, who, in his spare time, helmed a Satanic youth group named The Order Of The Evil Eye. Starting out in 1988, Crowley teamed up with his brother-in-darkness (and occasional electronic music composer) Peter Gilmore to disseminate his belief system using Acheron’s brutal death metal music, which included a number of popular demos before the unleashing of their Rites of the Black Mass debut in 1991. With their debut Acheron presented themselves with straight forward death metal with hints of Master/Deathstrike and a hardcore punk attitude towards simplicity and drive. Like those other Americans Deicide the lyrical emphasis was on satanism instead of gore. The term blackened is a newbie term so I will not use it. In those days this was just satanic death metal. And in fact it still is. The album is more about the message and intensity than it is about musicality and nuances. Don’t expect something similar to Nocturnus. The simplicity of the album is slightly corrected by the use of intros between all the songs. While in essence this seems a good idea it also tends to break the albums dynamics just like Pestilences Testimony of The ancient. The album could have done with only half of the intros really. The vocals are very generic but do the trick. The session players Slate and Strauss play their parts with ease (it is obvious they can do a lot more than this) so the album does not sound forced. Yet, because of the very decent clean production the aggression of the material suffers and the simplicity of the songwriting becomes too obvious. The album could surely have done with a more brutal sound. Vincent Crowley is one ugly motherf**ker and this album should have been just like that. In conclusion: this album is not what it could have been. And it came two/three years too late to leave a real impression on the scene.

Track listing:
1. To Thee We Confess
2. Thou Art Lord
3. Ave Satanas
4. Summoning The Master
5. One With Darkness
6. Prayer Of Hell
7. Unholy Praises
8. Cursed Nazarene
9. The Enochian Key
10. Let Us Depart