Persecutory - Summoning the Lawless Legions

PERSECUTORY - Summoning the Lawless Legions (GODZ OV WAR - CD 2022)

Persecutory hails from Turkey and “Summoning the Lawless Legions” is a second album from them. Honestly, I feel disappointed that I had not heard the previous CD “Towards the Ultimate Extinction”. Why? Because I think that this new effort sounds fantastic and I always like to have entire discographies of bands, which caught my attention as much as Persecutory did. Well, I am sure that I will catch up with their discography and get the debut asap. In the meantime, let’s play “Summoning the Lawless Legions”.  

In a brief introduction, I would say that Persecutory plays an insanely vicious and bestial death / black metal. Their music has no compromises, it is fast as hell, violent, it is morbid and ferocious. Persecutory found a great balance between the styles I mentioned above – having the intensity and evil aura of black metal with heaviness and crushing wall of sound of death metal. But you need to know that their music is also far from obvious and one-dimensional. They have seven to eight minutes long songs, so it obliged them to bring more interesting compositions, think about song structures, more varied ideas and stuff like that. You cannot blast for eternity, right? And here is where Persecutory succeeded the most. There are many ideas within every song, a lot of diversity, with tempo variations or riffage style... Damn, they even found enough space for some memorable harmonious leads and stuff like that. And all within the purity of the genre (no keyboards, no experiments, nothing like that). Any bands I would make a comparison to? Well, you can find a bit of Tsjuder for instance, while the vocals do remind me Necrosodom a lot (with a few cleaner sounding parts here and there - and they sound fantastic!).  

I find a lot of pleasure in listening to this album, I have to say. Especially when Persecutory blasts like a damn crazy maniac, they sound excellent and there’s absolutely nothing that I would not like about “Summoning the Lawless Legions”. If you check tracks like “Thou Abyssic Fire In Rebellion”, there’s a huge dose of powerful energy in it, so much fury and intensity... It’s just hard to resist. 

Standout tracks: “Thou Abyssic Fire In Rebellion” 

Verdict: 85/100