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So I was debating with myself: what do I write up for my 666th review? I seriously considered doing Iron Maiden's The Number Of The Beast, but we have a perfectly good review of that already up, and I wasn't really going to say anything that Eddie hadn't already said about that one. But still, 666th review, have to do something appropriate. So here, for my Satanic review, we will do the sort-of debut for long-gone Finnish band Beherit. Their proper full-length debut was Drawing Down The Moon in 1993, but this is widely regarded as their first album, even though it really isn't. See, Beherit obtained a good bit of cash in 1990 from a label called Turbo Music to record a full-length album, to be titled The Oath Of Black Blood. After several months, during which the band spent all the money on booze, there was no album. So Turbo took a couple of old demos, slapped them together and marketed the result. So this is usually considered Beherit's debut, despite that it is really a compilation of some demo recordings.

This is Beherit, which means musically it makes old Venom sound like Dream Theater. Like Drawing Down The Moon this is a complete disaster captured on tape, and it could not really be any cooler without losing that Black Metal magic. If you cleaned this up any, it would lose all its charm. If you have never experienced Beherit, then trust me when I say you will never hear a more unprofessional recording. It's all here: the whispering rasp vocals, the off-time blastbeats, the guitars that sound like they were underwater during the recording – all the magic ingredients of this classic evil band. Musically I can't defend this except to say that for all their extremely obvious shortcomings, Beherit are still fucking cool. Terrible as this is, it still captures something of the essence of Black Metal. Like Hellhammer, this manages to both totally suck and completely rule at the same time. If you can find this anywhere, and you are at all a devotee of old-school Black Metal, then you need to have this. Trust me.