Lord Belial
Enter the Moonlight Gate

Hello, we are Lord Belial, a Swedish black metal band.

Yes, we are another one among the endless black metal bands from Scandinavia.

We released "Kiss The Goat" in 1995, our first album, and in 1997 "Enter The Moonlight Gate", which, when someone talks about it, is generally considered our masterpiece and a masterpiece in the melodic black metal genre.

Now, another of our fans wants to review this record.

Lord Belial is a strange band. When you hear someone talking about them, you can be sure they're praising or exalting them or simply talking well of them, but you'll hardly hear anyone speak badly about them, at most only in albums like Angelgrinder where the death vein is more pronounced.

Yet, despite all this, it always seems like they're a completely unknown and overlooked band.

But surely, with such a masterpiece in their discography, they deserve to be much more famous than they are now, and, although they have not been a milestone in any genre, they are still a CRUCIAL band for melodic black metal.

I'm a huge fan of Lord Belial, I could never make a list of influences heard in their music because I consider them unique and unsurpassable. I notice that the use of melody is similar to that of Dissection, but I find Lord Belial to be three times better than Jon's band.

No kind of epic intro or anything like that in this album, just a voice that says the phrase "Enter...the moonlight gate", then immediately the song starts with continual blast beat on the drums.

I will never stop praising Dark's scream, both for how it makes the words he says intelligible (try it to believe, I'm not saying you can get an entire text out, but certainly a few lines), and for its evilness that marries the music's.

The first song, "Enter The Moonlight Gate" indeed, is in my opinion one of the best of the work (although all are the best of the work in my opinion), where the Swedes demonstrate they can masterfully use a flute amidst this furious black metal, but never abandoning a refined taste for melody, and where they show they can masterfully use female choirs, an alternative that's rarely used well; both the flute and female choirs will remain more or less throughout these fifty minutes.

Another highlight of this masterpiece is "Lamia", and here you'll understand what I mean when I repeatedly say how good Lord Belial is at incorporating the flute into their songs, while always maintaining great riffs (this is their real strong point), direct, violent, and melodic.

The instrumental "Forlorn In Silence" is a pearl of coldness. Two guitars continuously chasing each other in a whirlwind of continuous emotions, another demonstration: Lord Belial are monsters even with acoustic instrumental songs.

Perhaps the only avoidable thing in all of this is the excessive minutes of silence in the last track, with about seven actual minutes of music, silence until almost the end of the song where suddenly a drum that emulates a march jumps out, which is probably, considering the song's title "Realm Of A Thousand Burning Souls (part II)", the march of the "thousand burning souls". Or a warning: Lord Belial will return.

In black metal, apart from depressive black metal bands, Lord Belial is one of the few bands (if not the only one) that can elicit emotions from me at these levels.

Legendary figures. And I haven't used any big words like this frivolously.