A mid pace with great vocals and hammering drum work thrash album, that’s all you will find in this awkward album, why awkward? Well for starters, it’s too long, I have nothing against long albums, is just that if you are going to record a long album, then you better find ways for people not to get bored, and that can be very though if you recycle too many riffs just to maintain a certain level of aggression. Maybe Venom was just trying to set a mood, and hey guess what…they did! Metal Black is long, monotonous and heavy, it still has that good old Venom sound spray on every tune, and Cronos vocals are better than ever, but none of these good attributes saved this record from mediocrity.

Without Mantas on guitars, Venom appears to run out of ideas by the 3rd track, everything just sounds the same; there are no surprises or changes of pace, transforming Metal Black in a record were the Lant brothers display great abilities, Cronos having like always an amazing vocal approach and brother Antton destroying everything with precise, heavy and simply amazing drum work; but the rest is left untouched, its like they wrote three songs and they based the entire album on those three ideas until they run out of them and began to repeat themselves hoping nobody will know.

You want to know what those three ideas were, here is a clue: Assassin, Lucifer Rising, Antechrist, the rest is just a bad remake of those three good, solid, catchy songs.