Maximum Metal Rating Legend

Impaled Nazarene - Death Comes in 26 Carefully Selected Pieces - 2005 - Osmose Productions

Track Listing1. Intro 2. The Horny and the Horned 3. Armageddon Death Squad 4. Goat Perversion 5. 1999: Karmageddon Warriors 6. Motopenis 7. Kohta El Naura Enaa Jeesuskaan 8. The Endless War 9. Sadhu Satana 10. Ghettoblaster 11. Coraxo 12. Soul Rape 13. Sadastic 666/Under a Golden Shower 14. Zero Tolerance 15. The Maggot Crusher 16. Let's Fucking Die 17. Tribulation Hell 18. We're Satan's Generation 19. Cogito Ergo Sum 20. Goat Seeds of Doom 21. Condemned to Hell 22. Intro S.F.P. 23. Sadogoat 24. Vitutuksen Multihuipennus 25. The Lost Art of Goat Sacrificing 26. Total War - Winter War

Death Comes in 26 Carefully Selected Pieces is the latest release from Finnish black metallers Impaled Nazarene. It’s a live album, recorded in late 2004 at a concert in Finland. Usually live albums are a lot of fun but for an artists’ real quality work you have to buy the actual studio albums. This is far from the case with Impaled Nazarene. Live, they are twice as intense, twice as heavy, and twice as good as they are on their studio albums, which I’m not a huge fan of. This disc, on the other hand, is deserving of lots of listening time.

Lots of notable Finnish musicians have spent some time in Impaled Nazarene, like Alexi Laiho of Children of Bodom and Teemu Raimoranta (RIP) of Finntroll. Right now there’s no one that has gained fame in any other way other than this band working with them, but that doesn’t mean there’s no talent. Vocalist Mika Luttinen has one of the most intense voices in black metal, and drummer Reima Kellokoski is pretty damn fast. The guitars and bass aren’t too shabby either – so I’m not surprised that these five put on a magnificent live performance.

A 26 track release is unheard of in black metal, even for a live album. The ability to do such a thing makes Impaled Nazarene quite unique indeed. If you don’t count the handful of tracks that are just intros or speaking, there are still 23 or 24 real songs on this album. This wouldn’t work if they were all four or five minutes, obviously. Lucky for us, Impaled Nazarene often take a death-grind approach to their songwriting and procure extremely fast, extremely heavy, two minute long songs. Somehow, the riffing, drumming, and vocals still manage to stay within the realm of black metal, even in such short songs. This makes for a very interesting listening experience indeed.

Any Impaled Nazarene fan would be doing him or herself a disservice by not picking this up – as I’ve said before, it’s better than the studio releases. Anyone who has heard them and not enjoyed them, I’d still recommend giving this album a shot. I wasn’t crazy about them until I heard this, which has quickly become my favorite live black metal album out of all the ones I own. Nothing can top pure aggression, which is exactly what you get from these guys.

8.5/10

--Veritas 08.22.05