Lair Of The Minotaur
The Ultimate Destroyer

When there is no more room in hell, the dead start walking the earth. Listening to this "The Ultimate Destroyer," I would say that old Beelzebub must be quite busy down at the spa. Indeed, because Lair Of The Minotaur have decided to make some room in the inferno by resurrecting a rather bulky corpse: that of Metal. The stench is unmistakable: cellar and sweat, beer and blood.

The guys from Chicago step into the shoes of Dr. Frankenstein with uncontrollable vehemence, and as with the psychotic dreamer, they lose control of the monster. The shockwave is deadly, and behind it, there isn't much profound content to be hidden.

"Forged metal from fires of the hearth/ Hades hammer pounds the Earth/ Keep my steel at my side/ And my enemies skinned alive."

These are verses that are unlikely to be mistaken for the new manifesto of futurism. At most, we are faced with Whitman's Barbaric Yop, forgive the sacrilegious citation. To leave the metaphor, this is the album that the grand elders of the scene are no longer able to write. This is an album that was born dead but refuses to surrender to the evidence; it is the villain in every horror film. The one that, after untold tortures, with immense sacrifice and for one last time, suddenly rises again, aware in its maniacal eyes of being defeated but determined to give that last, invaluable shiver to its victim, now an implacable executioner.

And if you don't listen to metal because, you know, it's considered uncool lately, you can easily latch onto the fact that these folks are under the beloved Southernlord's wing and delight your mind with the small sludge doom inflections that here further bastardize an album that has plenty of bastardization to offer by the shovelful.

The profound, radically, and undeniably Metal nature of this 2006 work will remain between you and me.