King Satan – The Devil’s Evangelion
King Satan – The Devil’s Evangelion
Noble Demon Records
Release Date: 08/11/24
Running Time: 43:35
Review by Dark Juan
Score: 123,456,789/10
Well, that was a bit of a surprise.
I was just doing a bit of preparatory reading prior to sharing my thoughts about Finnish Industrial Metal band King Satan, by going back to the review I wrote about them on Ever-Metal.com way back in 2019 (https://www.ever-metal.com/2019/11/11/king-satan-i-want-you-to-worship-satan/, should you wish to read what a much younger Dark Juan was like, and be relieved that I appear to have matured) and it appears that I was more than a little bit excited about them and that, upon listening to them, my imagination went off on a tangent where there were many cheerleaders off their faces on psilocybin and dancing to Boney M records on a mirrored dance floor, but then they grew roller skates on their feet and somehow, deplorable Nazi cunt Varg “The Living Human Scarecrow” Vikernes was involved, but then subsequently discarded like the piece of godawful human trash he is.
Good afternoon, dear friends, this review will not involve flagellating your dogboy or anything like that although the music of King Satan is frankly fucking kink-friendly, but we will be probably visiting the imagination of Dark Juan again, and that is never a comfortable experience, especially when music has taken us there as it is normally both perverse and blood-soaked.
For the purposes of full disclosure, King Satan actually emailed me and asked for this review, so it’s their fault and they are the ones you can blame, OK? I am an innocent party and therefore will not accept any legal obligations for anything that might hurt your delicate little sensibilities, alright?
Fuck’s sake, I’m only on the first new King Satan song, ‘New Aeon Gospel’ and they are already making me angry and want to fight again. Their melding of Hellektro, Metal, Industrial and EBM speaks right to the most primitive parts of Dark Juan’s animal brain and they are already making me want to sink my teeth in the soft throat of my enemies and tear until the blood runs unchecked over chin and beard and there’s a rattle coming from where their throat used to be, which gets weaker as the spraying of bright scarlet arterial blood slows as vascular pressure drops and the light goes slowly out of their eyes as death takes them…
Yes, Tampere in Finland has much it needs forgiveness for. This fourth album from King Satan keeps to a similar dynamic to the first three, but this time the band have added a more martial Black Metal aspect and blastbeats in there as an admixture to their Industrial Metal and insane Gabba Techno, a perfect example of this being ‘The Carnivalesque of Dark and Light’ which combines machine gun percussion with outlandishly overblown guitar solos and dangerously unhinged keyboards, all underpinned with the inchoate, savage roaring of vocalist King Aleister Satan who roars and snorts and growls his way through the sheer madness of a King Satan song.
There’s even a Lordi-esque power ballad called ‘Destroy the World’ that offers a complete volte-face compared to the rest of the album, which (if you know Dark Juan, he absolutely fucking hates power ballads with a PASSION and thinks, generally, that they are a) a cynical cash grab and a blatant attempt at charting, b) a panty-dropper so the singer can be balls deep in a young lady in short order or c) just fucking plain lazy. Dark Juan also has RULES about this – ‘Alone’ by Heart is the absolute ZENITH of a power ballad, as is Skid Row’s ’18 And Life’ and if the song I am listening to does not meet the standards of those two songs there’s going to be trouble) is actually pretty good, if not really a piece of music that has a particular target, whereas ‘The Devils and Saints’ is all double-bass drumming at lightspeed velocities and Hekate Boss stabbing desperately at the keyboards trying to keep up with a bizarre sound that is a hybrid of carnival calliope and Ecstasy-addled Dance music.
It is this peculiar and outlandish, deeply unique insanity in musical form that makes King Satan so spectacular to listen to. They sound like butchery by laser beams, once living beings falling into surprisingly clean vats (as laser beams cauterise when they are cutting) on each side of a production line in tidy quarters after passing through a grid of laser light, the only sounds being the clanking of the machinery carrying off inert flesh for cleaning, cutting and packaging for the baying, carnivorous masses at the sales points of the abattoirs, posthumans who no longer care where the flesh they crave comes from as long as they can cram fresh, red meats down their avid throats, offering their wealth and even their own offspring for the packing lines in their maddened addiction for flesh. The delicious, juicy, flavourful flesh, dripping with blood and edged in fat and sliced for their convenience and consumption. Cooked on open fires near the entrances to the abattoirs or rammed down their throats raw, grinning with bloodied teeth at each other, the people of a warped world clamour for ever more meat from this armour-plated, entirely robotic plant that takes in humans, bovines, porcines, anything that can be neatly butchered and consumed…
Those are the images King Satan conjure in my imagination and that is why they must be stopped. Their knowing nods and winks to the cartoonish horror imagery of Rob Zombie, and the development of Hekate Boss as a singer from blank-eyed little girl voice to a much richer and more accomplished vocalist are canards, a deliberate attempt to distract you from the spittle-flecked madness that King Satan REALLY embodies. Their development into a band that is much more heavy than the band of 2019 I last reviewed is also pleasing – gone is a lot of the cartoonish silliness in favour of a grimmer sense of humour (he says, just as the last song, ‘Epilogue (The Phoenix Song)’ is playing and it turns out that the mad Finnish bastards have decided that their idea of a bubblegum Pop song with a Country influence is the right way to close out forty off minutes of madness) and rather more sophistication in the execution of their music.
In short, “The Devil’s Evangelion” runs the full gauntlet from the metronomic precision of Neue Deutsche Härte, the grimdark perfection of Industrial, the sheer insanity of Aggrotech and Hellektro and the crushing power of Metal but does it in a way that allows room for humour as well as all-encompassing, gibbering insanity.
In short, Dark Juan still loves King Satan as much as he did in 2019. It seems that both Dark Juan and King Satan have matured and left behind BDSM in favour of sheer bloody murder.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (Patentoitu Dark Juan -veriroiskeluokitusjärjestelmä ystävilleni ja lukijoilleni Suomessa! On harvinaista, että minulla on mahdollisuus puhua teille kaikille. Minun on kuitenkin kysyttävä – King Satan. Mikä sinua vaivaa, että sinun täytyy tehdä tällaista musiikkia?) awards 123,456,789/10 for an album that is a vicious as it is amusing. Dark Juan fucking loves it.
TRACKLISTING:
01. New Aeon Gospel
02. Abyss of the Souls
03. Chaos Forever Now (feat. Nachtmahr)
04. Once Upon A Shadow
05. A Death Before Death
06. The Carnivalesque of Dark and Light
07. Destroy the World
08. The Devils and Saints
09. Satanas Rex Mundi
10. The Devil’s Evangelion
11. Epilogue (The Phoenix Song)
LINE-UP:
King Aleister Satan – Vocals, programming
Hekate Boss – Keyboards, vocals
EF-13 – Guitars
Jerry Rock’n’Roll – Bass guitar
Pete Hellraiser – Drums, programming
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
