Love thrash, love black metal (sometimes). Blackened thrash? Fuck my shit all the way up. DAEVA‘s eruptive arrival in our realm with their first LP is a welcomed event for someone like me. Even better, a staggering three members of Crypt Sermon, one of the best bands out, make up this band’s legion of hellhounds. The stylistic difference is staggering though – where Crypt Sermon were classically indebted doom/heavy metal with a fantastical take on the battle between the righteous and occult, DAEVA are immensely, firmly, outrageously at war with God. And it is so beautiful.
This is the kind of stuff that you truly feel depraved for listening to. Between its on-the-sleeve blasphemy and hammering delivery that could pry open the gates of heaven, Through Sheer Will And Black Magic… is the sound of angels dying. If DAEVA existed in the time of Satanic Panic, we’d be having a congressional hearing about them. Then again, I won’t rule it out still due to how puritanical the US is becoming in other, more harmful ways. At any rate, this provides an aural sword to hold at the neck of God no matter your reasoning.
What the quartet achieve here is one of the most heady mixtures of black and thrash metal I’ve heard in quite some time. Drums are the perfect marriage of punked-out and blasting rhythms representing each side admirably. Guitars are inhumanly fast and consistent, slowing to potent grooves before injecting some adrenaline into the track with mile-a-minute riffs. Bass reverberates menacingly like the impending stampede of devils and demons. It all assembles into a profane alchemical reaction, through sheer will and black magic indeed.
It’s hard to point to select songs on this album as everything is blisteringly unwavering in energy and execution. Literally, diversity does exist – “Intro (Emanations)” is the sole atmospheric song on Through Sheer Will And Black Magic… and sets the tone by being somewhat of an elevator ride down into hell. It’s harrowing and only suggestive in tone of the sonic sodomy to take place mere minutes later with “The Architect and the Monument”, the album’s true thesis statement. Vocals are incanting, commanding of both the armies of hell and the lost souls that fuel them. Vile snarls and growls permeate an already acrid and sulfuric air – I’m reminded favorably of my first forays into black metal with bands like Dimmu Borgir, but DAEVA are another beast entirely.
The one-two punch of “Arena at Dis” and “Passion Under the Hammer” is exhilarating – as much as a speedy death march to fiery pits can be. “Arena at Dis” conjures images of the lowest, most violent and unscrupulous levels of hell, as referenced by The Divine Comedy. Towering brutes and champions can be seen rending weaker and less prepared beings in half, blood everywhere, it’s a fun time. It’s one of the most brutally fast songs on the record too, an accolade in itself. “Passion Under the Hammer” has the honor of having the best opening riff of the album’s nine songs, and the whole of the track is profoundly groovy, almost like a stoner metal song was sped up three times. The video’s imagery of crumbling churches and tormented souls is right on point of the mood of the song, showing decrepit waste of both man and its pillaged sanctuaries.
A daeva is commonly referred to in many religions as an entity that represents or sows disorder, an agitator of evil or ill intent. The band is aptly named, then, as not only to they agitate the Christian institution and philosophy with their wicked take on extreme metal, but they agitate the hell out of us as listeners. It’s mean, taunting divinity before razing it to the ground.
DAEVA are unavoidably and aggressively palpable, and Through Sheer Will And Black Magic… leaves you gored on Satan’s horns by the time it’s over. There’s really no two ways about it. It’s a proclamation of power, a heretical boot planted on the throat of moral decency, and I love every minute of it. If you have a dark twinkle in your eye, and your skin starts boiling when passing by a church, this album may very well awake the fiend in you.
