HELL’S CORONATION – Ritual Chalice Of Hateful Blood

The sound is the first thing that strikes when the debut by Polish act Hell’s Coronation starts: the wall of distorted guitars with an impenetrable thickness makes the listener feel as if they are fumbling in the dark, busy escaping from a looming threat that is about to swallow them. This is the perfect sound rendering for the music contained in Ritual Chalice Of Hateful Blood, a record that rediscovers a certain way of making black metal and adds some more weight to it with doom influences. The duo consisting of Zepar and Coffincrusher was founded in 2016 and has since released two EPs titled Antichristian Devotion (2017) and Unholy Blades Of The Devil (2018), sharing then a split with Cadaveric Possession.

Ritual Chalice Of Hateful Blood represents their full-length debut and is distributed by Godz Ov War Productions. Hell’s Coronation took the opportunity and printed an album that already shows signs of a certain personality. If you are looking for blast beats and tremolo picking, know that you will not find any: the band’s approach to black metal is closer to the primitive conception of the genre, which prefers to evoke an annihilating malevolence rather than giving in to the impetus for which the genre is notorious. This is some kind of an huge ritual dedicated to Evilness with a capital E, interpreted with emphasis by a dirty scream in the mood to recite blasphemous verses. We are somewhat closer to the style of black metal played by Samael, or the one dear to another Polish band that recently passed through our pages, Domain. In the Hell’s Coronation‘s music, however, the doom factor takes on a certain predominance, never resulting in moments of heartbreaking distress and discouragement, but generating that slow and relentless drive, that totalizing heaviness that seems to want to consume the absent-minded listener and then spitting out their bones.

While listening, it is surprising to note that the album improves significantly from song to song; I don’t mean to deny the validity of the opener “Covenant Of Doom”, but during the listenings one has the impression that the most inspired moments have been kept for the next tracks, with more compelling pieces in the catchy passages and less shyness when it comes to introduce keyboards as a background, creating epic sections within more complex structures. I don’t deny that the bottom of Ritual Chalice Of Hateful Blood‘s tracklist (i.e. “I Crush The Sanctity Of Christ” and “Resurrection Through Condemnation”) is precisely the moment when the band gave their best, completing the stylistic synthesis of their music. Obviously we expect this not to be the end of the band’s growth: if we consider Ritual Chalice Of Hateful Blood has been successful in creating a sound that already shows a certain personality, I think it is worth keeping an eye on Hell’s Coronation in the future.