There is a term that I believe can be applied to the context in which this Brazilian band portrays their latest material… “Overkill” and I don’t mean the band, I literately mean overkill, you know the action of excessive killing; in this case excessive black metal imagery, sounds, ideas, lyrics, pictures… you know what guys! We get it, you play black metal and you are satanic! But take it down a notch with all the anti-Christian rhetoric, because after a while it begins to sound quite childish and your music deserves way more than that.
So their “attitude” might be considered a bit childish, embracing with way too much enthusiasm every single black metal cliché; but how’s the music? There is some good melodic black here, clean when it needs to, and dirty when the energy and the song requires it.
Lucifer Rex II is an album design to get rid of people that can’t absorb this type of black metal; Spell Forest does that by including two consecutive huge songs on just the first 3 tracks, ironically this two pieces are the best of the entire production. The Brazilians do have a great sense of melody and appeasement when they need to explore deeper more “funeral doom” feelings (just listen to the great “Omne Goccia Di Sanguis Pro Tuum").
The band can play their “Emperor a la Brazilian” to an almost perfect execution, and there are some interesting and almost surprising ideas and riffs (just check Raped Cherub) sprayed all over the album, the problem is the length and the simplistic way of just letting the album go for as long as it wants to without a clear idea or variation between the tracks; Lucifer Rex II could have been easily reduced to 10 songs and it will have provided a much bigger effect than this colossal, introverted slab of black metal.
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