Vehemency
Furious and militant black / death metal, yeah yeah, all too seen area. Spearhead is one of those rather recent acts that don’t much, or in this case at all, care for sweet and calmful melodic passages; instead, this is pure war. And while the result of an album-lenght of mere savage violence can often end up being a very tiresome listening experience, this band’s third full-length Theomachia hits the right spots and does not sound dull at all.
The key to the album’s success is how damn tightly they execute their instruments in relatively fast speeds, not unlike Impiety. If we want to drop more names, Morbid Angel and Angelcorpse are another names worth mentioning here, as those bands’ fans will most likely enjoy what they hear on Theomachia, an album full of ass kicking and chaotic riffage - with the exceptions of the brief interlude ”Praesagium” and the last track ”Aftermath” with its focus on discordant atmosphere. What comes to the uniqueness of the album’s compositional work, well, there’s not really any of that. But in a case like Theomachia, which deliberately feasts on primitive death / black metal ideas initiated twenty years ago already, it does not matter.
Due to its ultimately unsurprising nature, I can’t say Theomachia is a true masterpiece, but in its category a real treat anyhow. Production-wise, the album sounds sharp and crisp, a necessity for a violent effort like this. There’s no need to go much further into specific details of tracks; all that needs to be said at this point is that this war machine is a recommendable album for the fans of the groups mentioned in the paragraph above. I doubt they’d be disappointed.