For the new album of Behemoth are the ghosts. In the music magazines to overturns with praise, and the band also seems to attract some new fans who were previously not do anything with her. The diehard fans of their more technical, very death metal heavy beatings albums seem rather disappointed but partly. Already at the pleasure of the circulating on the Internet in advance song "Blow Your Trumpet, Gabriel" and "Ora Pro Nobis, Lucifer" is also clear why. The songs are straightforward, simple and - one might almost evil word "commercial" mentioned in this context - catchier than one is used to from the previous albums. From the brutal Death Metal elements hear not much, the songs are a lot more back towards Black Metal and put more of a gloomy, melancholy mood because of thrashing a la Morbid Angel. Through the production, which still sounds like typical Behemoth, the sound comes nevertheless powerful and all niederwalzend from the speakers. How does the rest of the album? Like the two previously known songs have suggested, in fact one moves mostly mid-paced, although with "Furor Divinus" and "Amen" but then two numbers in the usual blast-beat manner therefore shoot and also the rest of the songs never without faster manage parts. Otherwise sets you much more than before on the production of mood and theatricality - which indeed matches the stage concept of the band. But many a fan of the usual fare like that are annoying and I did not immediately have access to the album. "Messe Noire" For example, I first opened up not - the piece acts for the band very experimental and just the chorus initially struck me as totally unmusical and uncreative. Only after several Hördurchgängen I felt the piece as a sort of soundtrack in a play - you manage to give rise in the mind's eye of the listener pictures and implicate him part way into a kind grim fantasy world. The title track "The Satanist" is almost ballad therefore - melancholic, kept very quiet, then still anthemic enhancing the end. In "Ben Sahar" struck me as the single so much used by Behemoth in recent years the oriental (?) Bonds, yet the song then lined up also in the concept of this album, and not trying to sound like old doings. And with "O Father, O Satan, O Sun" sounds the disc with a long, very cool melancholic sluggish anthem slowly. "The Satanist" has thus become an album, which the band has something new daring. It has not reinvented the wheel, but dared themselves to redefine a place to number-Safe-album. And when I think back on "Evangelion", which I already could not be carried away as yet at that time, "Demigod" and even "The Apostasy", then I believe that it was also time for a breath of fresh air in Behemoth to bring music. In my opinion, you succeed. Perhaps the brutality of previously missing, perhaps the album is catchy through simpler song structures - whether it makes it approachable for the masses, I do not know and I do not care. But for that an atmosphere is created which draws the listener in its spell and leaves drift for a while in dark reverie. Considering Behemoth sense of theatricality, so I think that this is a new, but very appropriate side of the band, which also fit well together with their previous work. I can recommend to anyone, the album to listen himself, to make his own image and not blindly believing any criticism of disappointed fans - but not to give too hasty to adulation too much hearing. This album is very depending on mood - but if you can engage in it, then it will ignite!
