Cemetery Lust - Screams of the Violated

Pleasure to ReKreate

I've gone on record before claiming my main problem with the black/thrash subgenre is that there's typically little more to it than just molesting Kreator over and over again, and I still stand by that.  The title of "black/thrash" is such an egregious misnomer for this niche sound that I really think that we as a metal community need to rename it.  How many of these bands actually have any semblance of black metal in their music?  There are raspy vocals and harsh production and the occasional blast beat here and there but for the most part this style is thrash through and through.  Bands like Witchaven, Black Fast, Hellcannon, Ketzer, and the subject of this review, Cemetery Lust, all exemplify this problem.  Screams of the Violated here is essentially the twelve quadrillionth reimagining of Kreator's seminal classic, Pleasure to Kill, and I knew this going in based entirely on the aesthetics of the album.  But with that said, this is still rather enjoyable for fans of the style, or fans of extreme metal in general.

Squid Nasty and Nasty Nate's riffing is exemplified pretty well by their own names: nasty and repetitive.  There's very little variety on display here, with all but one track, "Black Angels of Hell", consisting of almost nothing but lightning fast buzzsaw riffs that were already written twenty five years ago.  That said, the energy put in by the band coupled with the excellently raw production make these riffs sharp and vicious as opposed to dry and tired.  This type of sound is perfect for the style if you ask me, it's rough and dirty but no instrument is compromised due to poor recording.  This is going to shock you, surely, but the vocals are reminiscent of Mille Petrozza.  It sucks that I can't think of any point of comparison other than Kreator, but really, give this a listen and you'll understand.  This is Pleasure to Kill worship and little else.  The strange part about all of this is that it's good.

For real, this album is preposterously infectious.  Despite (or perhaps because of) the riffs being so cliche, they are instantly hooky and lasting.  This album doesn't have a whole lot working for it in terms of originality, obviously (I've compared this to Kreator... what, twenty seven times already?), but it makes up for it with energy and songwriting.  It's a cavalcade of cliches, but it's put together rather well.  Fans of pretty much any band I've named dropped here will find something to love.  The band dubs their style "Rape Thrash", which I was hoping to make jokes about, but the unoriginality sapped my joke-making ability and the sheer ferociousness simply broke my brain.  "Black Angels of Hell" is bookended by two slower, doomier segments, but the rest of the album is vicious to the core, with highlight tracks being "Resurrected Whore", "Night of the Creep", and "Perverted Aggressor".


RATING - 79%