Review by Fran on February 20, 2022.

Everything in this record is obscure and condensed evil. Composition, production, vocal style, lyrics, the cover, all of that fit the occultist concept and image of the band.

The riffing is pretty straightforward, fast, dark and mysterious. Tone interval suggests lots of tension and suspense, giving you the feeling something wrong is about to happen. Pretty cool. There are melodic guitar lines everywhere, designed for that purpose. Despite being simple and easy to play, the riffs are extremely expressive. When you're talking about songwriting, simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication, and they nailed it here. The traditional death metal outfit is combined with a serious doom metal influence, there are also very slow passages driven by open power chords, super heavy; that combined with the ultra deep and low and guttural vocals sound pretty much like the lamentations from the souls trapped in hell. Take for example the last song of the album, which is 8 minutes long. The way it builds up; slow, dark intro for the first couple of minutes, then percussive accentuation to introduce traditional death metal riffs for a couple of bars, and then the whole bands kicks in in a blast beat frenzy. Lovely. They manage to build expectation with suspense and then fulfill it with brutality.

Production isn’t modern at all and is not very polished. It's actually pretty rough but you can understand each instrument most of the time. The raw character of the sound quality adds a lot of density to the album, the whole listening experience is super heavy, no matter how fast or slow they play. Drums sound completely old school, and they have a nice reverb on them to help them mix, and have vintage sound. Performance is pretty basic but is works, this isn't about being technical, this is about going to hell. Guitars are very downtuned, probably C, I'm not sure, but you can bet they have lots of lows and have a massive, super dense body. The guitar tone is heavily distorted for sure, but is also sent to the back by some effect, probably a reverb, so they sound even more deep and dismal. Bass guitar lays a solid base for the guitars to develop some harmonies, and it has a nice crunchy tone. Even if it doesn't stand out that much, it works pretty well. Vocally, production and the infernal and demented performance are the strongest points of the album. The gutturals’ level on the mix is kind of high, and they add echo effects that make it sound absolutely sepulchral.

Mortal Throne Of Nazarene is a cult album, indispensable for death metal fans. The epitome of the genre. Pure evil, sick shit.

Rating: 9 out of 10