This is the debut album from Sermon of Flames, an Irish blackened death metal band.
This is an album that offers the listener twelve portraits of extremity and harsh soundscapes. It contains 39 minutes of horror, so if you can stomach the band’s violent darkness for that long, then this is for you.
The songs are raw and cavernous, with guttural growls and nightmare sounds aplenty. This is extreme metal that’s been warped and ruthlessly augmented by noise and industrial elements. These are sewn deeply into the twitching corpse of Sermon of Flames’ music, like some long-forgotten experiment left to rot and mutate.
The band use chaotic dissonance like a weapon, alongside brutal death metal guitars that are coated in lethal blackened spikes, hooks, and blades. There are grindcore levels of aggression here; another weapon in the arsenal for the band to use to annihilate everything around them. Propelled by frenzied drums, this is music that’s utterly brutal when it wants to be. And, when it doesn’t want to be, it’s dark, abrasive, and terrifying; the band are perfectly able to craft grim atmosphere when there’s a need for it, and this just helps to give the album even more depth and substance.
The closest way I can think to describe this would be as a combination of Full of Hell, Vermin Womb, and The Body, but only if they came from the perspective of black/death metal, rather than grind and sludge.
I Have Seen the Light, and It Was Repulsive is an uncompromising work of horrific brutality and hateful intensity. This is one for hardened fans of extreme metal only, and if you’re a connoisseur of what can be found in the lower levels of the underground, then I heartily recommend Sermon of Flames to you.
Wonderbox Metal 