Such delightful moments like being able to review one of your personal favorite bands are rare, but fortunately right now I have the chance to do so with the new INCANTATION album, their seventh official release (I have left out the live albums, but included “Forsaken Mourning…”) and though another vocalist change took place and now John McEntee himself, main songwriter and band-chief, vomits his blasphemies at the Christian flock, “Decimate Christendom” finally marks a point in the history of INCANTATION where something like “routine” or “permanence” sets in. Of course this does not mean that the band is starting to get boring, hell no!!! But after a couple of very different sounding productions resulting in albums that despite containing killer songs came across rather muddy like “Mortal Throne Of Nazarene” or violently brutal like the last masterpiece “Blasphemy” or the classic debut, “Decimate Christendom” has a production very close to its predecessor and for the first time one can speak of the INCANTATION-sound not only in a musical but also in a technical sense. I like that a lot since the fluctuations in the US Death Metallers productions were a little perturbing. Now this problem has been solved and musically the band has kept 110% to themselves blending dark and aggressive brutal old school Death Metal with morbid, doomy passages to create unholy, sinister moods like no other Death Metal band does! Songs like ‘Blaspheme The Sacrament’, ‘No Paradise Awaits’, ‘Merciless Tyranny’ (killer beginning with one of the fiercest old school growls ever!) or the slower, ultra-heavy ‘Oath Of Armageddon’ are simply classic INCANTATION with the traditional riffs, small hooks and antireligious lyrics. No one who’s really into this band wants anything else and my listening experience with this album was that it is a bit of a “grower” album in contrast to “Blasphemy” which had was an instant kill and more surprising than “Decimate…”. Something worth of being criticized is the fact that INCANTATION waste a few minutes of playing time by two rather long passages of feedback noises respectively more or less silence on another track, a song more would have been better than that!!! Nonetheless “Decimate Christendom” remains a great piece of Death fuckin’ Metal, the band sounds as fresh and powerful as ever and I can only hope that with Listenable Records as the new label there will be more opportunities to see this band live and attract more Metalheads to the spirit and intensity of this almighty band! A sound file and further infos are available on www.listenable.net and believe me, the first track of the album which they selected as MP3 is one of the weaker tracks…