Bütcher: 666 Goats Carry My Chariot (2020)
Bütcher, from Antwerp, Belgium, delight in all that is crazy, cartoonish and comically EXCESSIVE in heavy metal: its volume, its violence, its visuals (leather, bullet-belts, corpse-paint, inverted crosses, you name it), and its quest for victory, by any shock tactics necessary.
Hail, Satan!
In keeping, the group’s 2017 debut was naturally (naturally) called Bestial Fükkin’ Warmachine (only 500 copies were pressed, twice as many sold!), and their 2020 sophomore long-player did its best to top that with 666 Goats Carry My Chariot.
Oh, but don’t worry: the Bütcher Boyz are in on the joke, and for proof you can skip right to the nine-minute title track, which duly interrupts its doom-laden grandeur to gleefully mimic Jake E. Lee’s rip-roaring “Bark at the Moon” riffs, and then pay falsetto worship to King Diamond and Mercyful Fate.
And that’s why this record is so much more fun -- more respectable, even -- than your average TRVE/CVLT black metal album, devoted to earnestly praising a second banana (Lucifer) to a god they claim not to believe in, in the first place.
So on with the fun: “Inauguration of Steele” is a traditional, mood-setting intro, complete with cryptic narrations and dramatic guitar harmonies that set up face-ripping melodic blackened thrashers like “Iron Bitch (Unholy Wielder of The Blade),” “Metallström/Face the Bütcher” and “Brazen Serpent.”
Other cuts like “45 RPM Metal,” “Sentinels of Dethe” and “Viking Funeral” vary the tempos, if not the band’s over-the-top mission, and of course there’s a mandatory instrumental outro boasting the quasi-flatulent title of “Exaltation of Sulphur.”
In sum: 666 Goats Carry My Chariot is heavy metal that never grew up!
It’s a state of mind where delirious, demonic, dark fantasy ditties offer escapism of the highest order for lonely, frustrated teenagers with aggression to burn, and it represents a life-phase we all wanted desperately to escape when we were 15-years-old, but would give an arm and a leg to return to, at 45.
Hail, Bütcher!
More Unrepentant ‘00s Metal: 3 Inches of Blood’s Battlecry Under a Winter Sun, Absent in Body's Plague God, Ancient Death's Ego Dissolution, Behold! The Monolith’s Defender/Redeemist, Bison B.C.’s Dark Ages, Black Cobra’s Feather & Stone, Blood of Kingu's Sun in the House of the Scorpion, Bongripper’s Satan Worshipping Doom, Christian Mistress’ Agony & Opium EP, Ghastly’s Mercurial Passages, Glorious Depravity's Death Never Sleeps, God Dethroned’s The Toxic Touch, Hammers of Misfortune’s The August Engine, Hedonist's Scapulimancy, High On Fire’s Surrounded by Thieves, Incursion’s Blinding Force, Inter Arma’s Paradise Gallows, Isen Torr's Mighty & Superior EP, Lair of the Minotaur’s The Ultimate Destroyer, Ludicra’s Fex Urbis Lex Orbus, Power Trip’s Nightmare Logic, Saviours’ Into Abaddon, Serpentine Path’s Serpentine Path, Skeletonwitch’s Beyond the Permafrost, Spectral Voice’s Eroded Corridors of Unbeing, The Sword’s Age of Winters, Trivium’s Ascendancy, Ulthar’s Cosmovore, Unearthly Trance’s In the Red, Vulcano’s Tales from the Black Book, Wastelander’s Wardrive, Witch Vomit's Funeral Sanctum.