Review: Malakhim – Theion

Swedish black metal band Malakhim were formed in 2017 and have up to now released one demo, one EP and one live album. They will kick off the beginning of 2021 by giving us their first full length album, Theion. What you can expect are 8 tracks with a total length of 41 minutes of pure, oldschool, unforgiving black metal.

When I say pure and oldschool, I mean pure and oldschool. I have been putting off doing this review for weeks, as I just could not decide what to write about here. This is a very hard text to fill with words.

Don’t get me wrong, Theion is actually quite good! To make it short, the band is giving it their all. The performances are great across the board here, and the album sounds great. Songwriting is good too, there’s enough going on within each song, and the tracks are varied enough, switching between faster, more frantic tracks and slower, epic and more oppressive songs. I have had lots of fun listening to the album! But on the downside, it is so very familiar, so very unsurprising, so very … orthodox.

If you like black metal in any shape or form, this record should be a safe bet. I can’t find anything bad here. Put it in, give it a spin, you’ll probably enjoy what you hear. Here on Theion, the second wave of black metal never ended. Just don’t expect anything groundbreaking. But maybe I am looking at this the wrong way. A new metalhead is born every day, and many of these younglings have not yet found their way around to black metal. You could do a lot worse than to stumble over Malakhim’s Theion for one of your first introductions to old school black metal.

So whether this is your first contact with black metal or a fix for a starving black metal addict, Theion is a fine recommendation either way. It might not please picky connoisseurs for its lack of originality. But who cares about picky connoisseurs anyway.

Merry christmas and hail satan!

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