Chapel
Satan’s Rock ‘N’ Roll
Invictus Productions
Street: 08.01.12
Chapel = Exciter + Sodom + Venom
An ominous organ intro, drunken Baphomet on the cover, booze-ridden song titles (“Alcoholocaust”) and goofy member monikers (Desolator, Devastator and Incinerator on guitar, bass and drums, respectively), the tingling in yer balls has already let you know that Vancouver’s Chapel play raucous mutations of black thrash and speed metal. Production-wise, Satan’s Rock ‘N’ Roll excels with hellish bass tones and an insistent drum punch, and no one’s denying the implicit draw of a title track that pledges allegiance to the Horned One via rock n’ roll. However, the litany of clichés and “been dones” comprising the unmemorable riffs and stylistic rehashing is hard to shake. It’s a solid paean to the “leather-chains-beer-bikes” aesthetic crafted by genre progenitors, repackaged with harsher vocals and more overt satanism, which disappointingly fails to announce itself as anything more than a staid tribute to touchstone albums like Orgasmatron, Under the Sign of the Black Mark and Welcome to Hell. –Dylan Chadwick